


Always the Only One

by oneoneandone



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:14:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 39,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27111769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneoneandone/pseuds/oneoneandone
Summary: Hope comes to stay on her brother’s ranch when life gets to be too much. And finds herself again in the sexy stable master with the quick grin and the smart mouth.
Relationships: Kelley O'Hara/Hope Solo
Comments: 5
Kudos: 40





	1. Prologue

“What do you need, Hope, are you okay? Do you need me to come out there?”

The worry in her brother’s voice comes through loud and clear, even if the words are muffled by the bad connection, the shoddy reception out there in the middle of some wide forgotten wilderness. She can picture him, his thick leather work boots, faded jeans. Some old t-shirt, maybe a hole in the collar, a streak of dirt across his chest, and a ball cap pulled down over his eyes to block out the noonday sun.

And as she imagines him, with their father’s gentle eyes and their mother’s firm mouth, she’s tempted to say yes. Just for a moment. She’s tempted to let her big brother fly out and help her untangle the mess she’s found herself in again.

But she can’t. He’s got enough on his plate, and there’s nothing to be done. No quick and easy fix to make things right again.

No, she got into this mess all on her own. She’ll just have to deal with the fallout.

Still. she wishes she could say yes, wishes it was years ago again, and he could fix everything with a band-aid and a Popsicle again.

Instead, she rubs a thumb at the space between her eyes and turns down his offer. “No, Marc,” she says into the phone with a sigh, “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m just tired, you know? I just need a break, some time away to figure out what to do about my career, my life.”

She takes a deep breath, and he can see her so clearly in his mind, so far, far away. She’ll be sitting outside, knees drawn up into her chest as she hunches in on herself. Even as a kid she did that, tried to make herself smaller, tried to fold up inside of herself. Like she could disappear into the space where her body was supposed to be.

Like if no one could see her, no one could hurt her.

It never quite worked, Marcus remembers, visions of his sister through the years dancing across his eyes. The world still always knew where she was, always knew how to cut her where it’d hurt the most.

“I was thinking–” she starts, but he interrupts, cuts her off before she can finish whatever she was going to say.

“Come home, Hope,” he tells her. “Pack a bag, hop on a plane, and come home. Hang out with your niece and nephew, take long morning rides in the fields, spend your afternoons napping on the porch. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just come home.”

She blinks away the tears that gather and threaten to spill over, to run, hot, down her cheeks.

“Marc, I–” but her word fades into silence as something in her chest cracks open, the place where she’s buried every dream, every want, every need that wasn’t her job, that wasn’t “Hope Solo, number one goalkeeper in the world,” the brand that followed her every move, every thought. A most unwelcome shadow, a prison disguised as a genie’s wish.

“I’m so tired, Marc,” she whispers, “I’m so tired of it all. The fans, the players, the press. I don’t even feel like me anymore. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

Her voice cracks, breaks, as she confesses everything she’s been bottling up for so long. As she feels everything seep out of her, all the anger and fear and contrived detachment, the role she’s played for so long.

“I know, Hope,” Marcus says quietly, in a voice almost like a lullaby, “but maybe this is exactly what you need. A break from everything. An escape. You know,” he adds gently, “it’s okay to run away sometimes. To give yourself some space to breathe and think.”

She’s silent, the only sound on the other end of the line is her breathing, hitched and heavy, and if he wasn’t worried before, if the media reports and the weeks and months of unanswered voicemails on her phone weren’t enough to concern him, it was her silence.

Because the Hope Solo he knows and loves, the Hope Solo he’d grown up with and cheered for and watched become one of the best athletes in the world?

That Hope Solo would have jumped on his words faster than he could get them off his tongue, an almost violent “I’ve never run away from anything in my life, Marcus” in an icy tone.

But this Hope, this Hope who is a stranger to him, to even herself, it seems, just sucks in a shaky breath.

“I’m so tired of running, Marcus,” she tells him, and the ache and pain inside of her is plain. He can almost hear her heart bleeding.

“I know, honey,” he says softly, soothingly, “I know.” It’s the voice he’s rocked his children to sleep with, the voice he’s whispered his love to his wife with in the earliest light of the dawn. It’s everything good and gentle inside of him, and he hopes that even through the crackle of the phone line, even through the static, she can hear it.

“Just come home, Hope,” he tells his sister once more, and it’s not a question, it’s a command. A fatherly request: Come home. Let us carry your burdens for a while, heal your wounds. Come home and let us make you light with life and laughter and love. 

He hears the tell-tale echo of his own voice in the earpiece, and knows that they’re just borrowing time before the call drops, before their connection is lost once again, and he’s about to speak when a shaky “okay” comes through, her voice rough and ragged and wet with tears, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

“I love you, kid,” he says, even knowing that they’ll talk again soon, because she needs to hear it, needs to remember that he’ll always have her back.

When he ends the call, Marcus leans back in his leather chair, boots up on the desk in front of him, and sighs.

It’s not the best timing. They’re down at least two members of staff and they’re fully booked through their busy season.

But Hope’s his sister, and she needs him. She needs this–home and family and the freedom to rediscover what she wants out of the world, who she wants to be in it.

They’ll make do, they always do.

“Hey, honey,” he shouts down the hall that leads to the family room, bringing his feet down and standing up, “guess what–Hope’s coming for a visit…”


	2. Chapter 1

The sun hasn’t quite made it over the mountains yet, but already the dew is evaporating off of the tall grass in the field next to the stables. It’s early still, and most of the ranch’s employees are only just slapping at their alarms and kicking off their covers.

Most.

Not all.

The stables have seen a flurry of activity for such an early hour. It’s pretty early in foaling season yet, but the ranch only had a few pregnancies this year. The final mare had gone into labor just before dinner the night before and the foal--a gorgeous black colt--made his appearance a little over an hour before dawn. It had been a pretty standard labor, and while mother and son are doing just fine, the stable-master and her assistant are looking a little worse for wear.

Still, there’s work to be done.

“You okay there, Diego?” the stable-master asks, seeing as her assistant--a tall, thin man just a few years older than her--leans heavily on the pitchfork he’s been using to spread clean, dry straw over the hard dirt floor of the foaling stall.

He opens his eyes and nods, moving to spread another pile of straw on the ground.

“Sorry, Kelley,” he apologizes sheepishly, but she waves it off.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelley tells him as she comes into the stall and puts down the bucket of feed she’d been carrying, “I know the new baby’s been running you pretty ragged the past few days. Rita says he’s been waking up every hour the whole night this week.”

He nods. “Yeah,” Diego says, “I mean, Mario’s an angel, you know? But he’s such a different baby than Rosie was. I don’t know why we were thinking it’d be exactly the same this time.” He gives her a grin that is tired, but full of love.

Kelley just laughs at him. “From what I’ve heard, every parent makes that same mistake with the second kid. But seriously, dude, you look like you’re going to fall over. Go home. I’ll finish up here and wait for the rest of the crew to show up. Maybe Jeremiah will come in early.”

“You sure, boss,” he asks, knowing she’s been up just as long as he has, and was the one struggling with the mare for most of the night.

Kelley just nods and holds out her hand for the pitchfork. “Go home, get some sleep, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow. That’s an order.”

Her voice is stern but her eyes are laughing, and she gives him a friendly punch when he passes her to exit the stall.

“You’re so bossy,” he calls from down the hall, but she can him laughing too.

\-----

Every step the new colt takes is surer, more confident. Work all done, just waiting for the first of her guys to come in, Kelley’s been killing time watching the beautiful new life she helped bring into the world last night.

Sal, the new mother, nuzzles at Kelley’s ponytail.

“You did good, old girl,” she says, reaching up to scratch gently at the mare’s soft, velvety coat, “he’s a beaut.”

It take about a half an hour for the first of the stable-hands to show up, but soon enough she hears the tell-tale rumble of a pickup pulling into the patch of gravel and dirt just behind the stable.

“Hey,” she says, reaching her arms up to rest against the tall wooden wall of the stall and letting her head drop forward onto her chest, stretching out the knots in her shoulders, “I sent Diego home already, we were up all night with Sal and her new colt.”

“Yeah?” the hand says, pulling on his thick work gloves and looking over to the foaling stall where Sal and her son are drinking from the trough.

She nods and straightens up. “I’m heading home now to get some sleep. I’ll probably stop by later to check on everything, but in the meantime if there’s an emergency call me. Oh, and Marcus will probably be by at some point--I left a voicemail for him with the news of the new colt. If you see him, let him know I’ll swing by the main house tomorrow, okay?”

Kelley yawns deeply as the young man nods in understanding. He’s one of the newer hires, but a good kid. And the more experienced hands will be in shortly to prepare the stables and the horses for the busy schedule of tours and lessons on the schedule today.

She gives the colt another quick glance, his mother, just to reassure herself that all is well, and then heads out the wide doors to the thin dirt path that will take her home, the small house with its bright garden and tall shade trees that are so pleasant to sit under as the last light of evening fades into night.

The dusty, muddy boots get kicked off just outside the back door on the wooden porch, and her clothes--stained, smelling of horse and earth and perspiration--are dumped straight into the small washer/dryer in the corner of the sunny kitchen.

A quick wash of her hands and face in the sink, and then the small woman, clad just her bra and panties, sticks her head into the fridge to see what she can find to eat among the mostly-empty shelves. And then, slice of leftover pizza in her mouth, another in her hand, Kelley climbs the narrow staircase to the bedrooms upstairs.

Falling to the bed with a groan, muscles sore and aching, and the hazy thick fog of exhaustion clouding her thoughts, Kelley pulls a thin blanket up and over her body, and within minutes, is fast asleep.

\-----

“Do you need anything from town?” Amanda Solo, a slight but sturdy woman with blonde hair and brown eyes, asks in a kind voice.

The ride from the airport has been quiet for the most part, Hope content to watch the cities turn into towns, and then farms and fields and long expanses of nothing but trees. Amanda, for her part, has played tour guide here and there, pointing out where her oldest son, Andrew, plays football, the little town with the tiny movie theatre that plays old black and white movies on Friday nights, the big Target that moved in just last year. They’re not strangers, Hope and her sister-in-law, they’ve just never spent a lot of time together. Not enough that they can move beyond the polite small talk of well-meaning acquaintances.

But from everything Marc has told her, everything she’s witnessed in the few times they’ve met, she knows that Amanda is kind but strong, and that she loves Marc and the kids wholeheartedly.

And so far, that’s enough for Hope.

“No, I don’t think so,” Hope answers.

She’s tired, and wants nothing more than to get to her brother’s ranch and away from the world. Her flight left early--before dawn, even. But the early departure had its benefits, mostly privacy and a distinct lack of people. Hope’d come prepared, though, a baseball cap, a hoodie, a pair of sunglasses. Anything to keep herself from being recognized, from having to put on a smile and a friendly face and sign autographs for or take pictures with people who didn’t give a damn about her beyond her name.

But she’d been lucky this morning. The flight had been mostly deserted, just a few businessmen with their noses buried in their newspapers and reports and laptops, all completely uninterested in who their fellow traveler was, or what she did for a living. No fans, no gathering crowds, no press of people in every direction, suffocating her, crushing her, all wanting some piece of her to take home with them.

Still, despite the easy fight and the lack of recognition, simply the worry, simply the stress of the possibility, has worn her down. Her heart is still racing, her hands still feel cold and clammy, and her tongue feels thick in her mouth.

“You sure,” Amanda asks again, “we usually only make the trek out once a week or so, so if there’s something you forgot---”

“---I’ll survive,” Hope cuts in, not as gently as she could have, and winces, wondering just how much Marcus had told his wife about why his sister was coming to stay. If she knows just the bare details--exhaustion, a disagreement with the coaches and a temporary suspension--or the whole story, the panic attacks, the claustrophobia, the growing agoraphobia, that this isn’t a suspension but a last-ditch attempt to stave off the mental breakdown that everyone close to her can see looming.

With the look her sister-in-law gives her, empathy plain in Amanda’s eyes, Hope figures it’s probably the latter.

Soon enough they’re pulling through a pair of wrought-iron gates, the name--”Last Chance Ranch”--high overhead, and along the long drive to the main house.

But they pass it by, and Hope looks over in confusion.

“Marcus thought maybe you’d like a little more privacy than you’d get at the house with us. Between the kids and the staff always in and out and around, it’s pretty busy there. Plus, we’ve got a lot of patrons this time of the year, family vacations and such. We thought maybe you’d like someplace a little more out of the way.” Amanda smiles at her, and it’s without judgment.

“So,” the blonde continues as they drive deeper and deeper into the ranch’s lands, “Marc thought sharing a house with our stable-master, Kelley O’Hara, would be a better idea. It’s quiet and pretty isolated, and he checked with Kelley, so there shouldn’t be a problem.”

When they slow to a stop, it’s in front of a small two-story house with a wraparound porch. There’s a small flower garden, reds and yellows catching Hope’s attention, and a stone path leading from the dirt drive up to the steps of the porch. It’s cute, homey-looking, and feels some of the tension in her shoulders ease at seeing it.

“Okay,” Amanda tells her as they exit the SUV and grab her bags, “pretty sure Kelley will be at the stables all day--there’s a mare pretty close to giving birth--but get yourself settled. We’ll have you over for dinner tonight, so either one of us will swing by to pick you up, or if Kelley’s free we’ll see you both around six, okay?”

Hope nods slowly, a surprised “oof” escaping her throat as her sister-in-law wraps her up into a tight hug.

“We’re so happy you’re here, Hope,” she whispers, “we want you to think of this place as your home.”

When she turns, key in hand, to take her two small bags up the porch, there are tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, and she’s just so glad that she managed to hold them back long enough for Amanda to get back into the truck.

Home, Hope thinks, and puts a bag down to wipe at her eyes.

She’s not even sure what that means anymore.

\-----

The late-afternoon sun is shining brightly through the trees and into the room when Kelley wakes, her stomach grumbling loudly as she rolls over, tangled in the thin sheet of her bed, to check the time.

“So much for checking back in this afternoon,” she says to herself and pats the empty space on the bed next to her, searching for her phone.

But no luck, she can’t find it.

The brunette’s stomach rumbles again, louder this time, and Kelley laughs. “Fine,” she says in an amused voice, “I’ll feed you first, but then a shower and my phone, okay?”

She stretches out her frame, her back cracking as she arches it, rolling her shoulders to soothe the last of the kinks of her long night, and heads for the stairs, stomach still making noise as she jogs down to the kitchen.

\-----

Hope jogs slowly up the dirt drive to the house she’ll be living in for at least the next few weeks. She’d unpacked her bags, taken a short nap on the comfortable bed in her room, explored the downstairs a little bit, and then, a little bored and having at least an hour before this Kelley woman was supposed to show up, at least according to what Amanda had told her, she laced up her shoes and queued up her iPod and set off on a run.

The land was gorgeous.

Mountains off in the distance, the dark green carpet of the forest. Here, on her brother’s land, acre after acre of free, endless field. Open, empty.

From somewhere nearby, she could hear the sound of voices carried by on the wind. But otherwise, it was so easy to run and forget. Forget the fear that crept up into her throat lately at the slightest hint of being recognized, forget the heaviness in her chest in the crowds outside the stadium or in the airport. Forget the way her hands quivered and shook every time she put her gloves on, every time she laced up her boots or pulled her jersey down over her head.

Out here, Hope felt light, easy. Felt like the world wasn’t pressing down so hard upon her for once.

As she jogs up the steps of the porch and kicks off her shoes, the tall woman turns to look out over the vast openness again.

The air is sweet, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, the breath she takes is easy, unburdened by all her worries and fears.

\-----

In retrospect, maybe she should have looked for her phone first.

Or showered.

Or put on something that might resemble clothes.

Because doing any one of those things before sticking her head into the fridge to see what sort of snack she could put together might have saved Kelley the embarrassment of turning around to find one of the most gorgeous women in the world staring at her with wide, disbelieving eyes as she continued to shake her ass while James Brown told her to “get up offa that thing.”

“Um, hey?” Kelley says weakly around the last slice of pizza she’d shoved into her mouth only seconds before.

It’s Hope Solo. It’s Hope Fucking Solo in her kitchen. Sweaty and standing with her mouth open, like she’s not exactly certain what to say.

And it’s not like Kelley hadn’t known who her boss’s sister was. She’s more than aware. But it had always been one of those abstract facts, something only brought up as a matter of trivia at big staff get-togethers and parties, something to share with the newbies, a sign that they’d been accepted into the inner circle: _Marc’s sister is famous, did you know that?_

But knowing that Marc grew up with Hope Solo, and having Hope Solo suddenly appear in her kitchen are two entirely different things, and Kelley finds herself speechless for maybe the first time in her life.

“Kelley, right?” Hope says, still standing stock-still in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the living room. Her face is blank, though it’s impossible to tell if she’s doing it deliberately, holding back a laugh at the younger woman’s expense, or if that’s just her normal expression.

“Yeah, Kelley. That’s me,” Kelley answers, shifting from one foot to the other as she struggles to decide whether this would be more or less awkward if she were wearing clothes, “and you are?”

Maybe pretending not to know the famous Hope Solo will have put them back on even ground, Kelley thinks to herself, seeing the surprise flicker across the goalkeeper’s light blue eyes.

 _Not so used to not being recognized, hey,_ the mischievous voice of Kelley’s inner monologue teased and, feeling a little off-balance still, the trainer decides to continue the charade.

“Oh,” Hope says quietly, eyes darting to the side, “Hope. Hope Solo. Marcus’s sister. Amanda said he contacted you to ask if you’d mind sharing the house for a few weeks?”

They groan simultaneously. Marcus is well-known for forgetting things.

Kelley lets her eyes skim over the other woman. She’s heard, of course, the brouhaha of late. The way the goalkeeper exploded in front of a group of fans recently. She’s heard the rumors, the accusations, and seen the press release about Seattle putting her on suspension for the next few months.

But there’s more to the story. She can see as much as she looks at the other woman.

There are bags under Hope’s eyes, the kind that makeup can’t fix, and a slump to her shoulders, like the whole weight of the world has rested upon them for far too long. Everything about her is tense, like she’s consciously holding every last cell together. Like if she stops paying attention, if she lets down her guard and relaxes, even for a moment, the whole house of cards that is her world will come crashing down around her.

She could say no, Kelley knows. She could tell Marcus that she’s not comfortable sharing her home, and she knows her boss would understand. But looking at Hope, really looking at her, Kelley realizes that she can’t. She won’t. Hope Solo is crying out for something, and if there’s a chance that she can find it here, a chance that Kelley can help relieve the pain and fear and worry in those clear blue eyes, she has to give it a shot. Has to let it happen.

“Kelley O’Hara,” she says, giving Hope her full name as she takes a step forward and extends a hand, “stable-master and riding instructor and sometime babysitter. Sorry about this all,” she continues, and motions to her general lack of clothing, “but I wasn’t expecting company. I think Marcus forgot to pass that message on to me, or if he tried to get in contact with me today, I was passed out with no idea where my phone is.”

She gives Hope her wryest, most sheepish grin.

“Long night,” the goalkeeper asks, and Kelley knows immediately that she’s been cast into the role of drunken party-girl roommate.

“Yeah,” she answers, “I was up all night with one of the horses.”

The taller woman gives her an apologetic look, but Kelley shakes it off.

“Hey,” she says, “listen. I was going to go take a shower and then find my phone. Why don’t I do that and then we can head into town to grab something to eat, get to know each other since we’re going to be sharing the house.”

“Oh, I was just on my way up to do the same,” Hope answers her, and looks up toward the stairs hopefully, “and then I’m supposed to have dinner with Marc and the family.”

Kelley swallows a sigh and decides to play the gracious hostess. “Why don’t you go first then,” she tells her new roommate, “and I’ll track down my phone in the meantime. I’m sure Marc realized what he forgot to do by now; I probably have at least fifteen messages from him.”

They laugh together, and Kelley thinks that maybe, maybe this might actually be a good experience. If Hope can unwind a little, if she can learn not to walk around half-naked, maybe they can make this work.

\-----

She finds her phone on the small table by the back door, right next to her keys. It’s dead, of course, but once she digs a charger out from under a cushion on the couch and plugs it in, the alerts start to sound.

_// Marcus: hey, k, call me //_

_// Marcus: got msg on colt, gj. srsly, call me, news. //_

Half the time her boss’s texts were a mix of commonly used text-speak and abbreviations he’d made up himself. Deciphering them sometimes was a bit of a chore.

_// Marcus: Missed call //_

_// Marcus: KELLEY //_

_// Marcus: Missed call //_

_// Diego: Hey, boss is looking for you. Called me, woke up baby. Thanks for that. :p //_

_// Marcus: k, hope coming. want 2 put her w/u. k? //_

_// Amanda: Kelley, Marc forgot to tell you that Hope is coming. Dropped her off at your place an hour ago. Let us know if this will be a problem, will make other arrangements. Congrats on new colt! //_

_// Amanda: And come for dinner tonight! Usual time. //_

_// Marcus: btw ur coming 2 din, rt? //_

_// Marcus: cn u brng h? //_

_// Marcus: 6:30 //_

_// Marcus: 6:00 //_

_// Marcus: owe u--name nu hors? //_

She hears the water turn off upstairs and sighs.

Looks like they’re both going to dinner tonight.


	3. Chapter 2

Dinner is awkward.

And, somehow at the same time, not.

There were moments, of course.

Marcus apologizing for forgetting to ask Kelley about Hope staying in her house, and then asking if she’d been surprised when his sister just appeared.

Hope’s wry smile and Kelley’s flush-pink cheeks.

But beyond that, the evening goes off without a hitch.

\-----

Kelley drives them over to the main house, pulling up right in front of the large vegetable garden that borders the east side of the house. They’re about twenty minutes late, and it’s entirely the younger woman’s fault for forgetting where she’d thrown her keys in her exhaustion earlier that morning. But she doesn’t appear to be too concerned, and so Hope endeavors not to worry about it either. 

And anyway, any worries she wasn’t able to bury are swept away as Marcus comes thundering out from the screen door and down the stone steps to lift her up into a twirling, swirling hug. It’s been almost a year since she’s seen her brother in person and it feels good, so good, to be wrapped up in her big brother’s arms again.

“Welcome home, Hope,” Marcus says in his low, rough voice, and she just hugs him tighter until a high-pitched squeal captures their attention from the top of the porch steps. Amanda’s standing there, holding a happily shrieking one-year-old Tommy in her arms, and just to her side is Rowan, four years old and tiny, blonde like her mother but with those deep blue Solo eyes, hopping up and down in excitement.

“Okay, go on,” Amanda says, and the little girl races down the steps and runs to where the stable-master is standing, leaning against the dark hood of the pickup truck.

“Ro!” Kelley exclaims, and Hope can hear the genuine affection in the other woman’s voice. Her niece jumps up into Kelley’s open arms, and settles comfortably on the other woman’s hip after a tight, sweet hug as they chatter together.

“Hello again, Hope,” Amanda says, coming down to stand with her husband and his sister, “did you get settled in okay?”

But before Hope can answer, Tommy shrieks again and launches himself out of his mother’s arms toward Marc’s ready hands.

“Whoa, there, little guy,” he says, bouncing the boy gently and turning back to his sister. “Hope, I’d like you to meet Tommy.”

And then, before she can stop him, Marc hands her nephew over to her, and she has no choice but to take him with stiff arms.

For a moment, no one’s sure that he won’t cry, unused to the strange new person holding him. But he doesn’t, just looks at her with this curious expression on his face.

“Hi, Tommy,” she says, a little wary. She hasn’t spent a lot of time with kids this young, not in a long time. It’s intimidating, to hold something so innocent, so small and new.

But then he smiles at her, and buries his head in her shoulder, rubbing his nose into the collar of her shirt. And she’s a goner.

A complete goner.

Nothing has felt more perfect in her life than the sweet weight of Tommy in her arms, the trusting way he looks up at her with his soft, brown eyes.

“I can take him back, if you’d like,” Amanda offers, adding that he’s probably tired and will be heading toward cranky soon, but Hope shakes her head.

“No, he’s fine,” she answers back, not even noticing the way she’s begun to sway back and forth with her hips, slowly rocking the little boy in her arms. But Marcus does, and Amanda, and they exchange a small smile while Hope talks to her nephew.

“Hey,” Marc calls over to Kelley and Rowan, “Ro, come over here and say hi to your Aunt Hope before you and Miss Kelley go off looking for trouble.”

The girl jumps out of Kelley’s arms and runs over to say hello. And there’s something about her that makes Hope think of the past, of her childhood and her father. Rowan is all guts and gusto, bold and brassy, as the elder Solo would have said. The very way he used to describe her as a little girl.

“Hi, Aunt Hope,” Rowan says, “we watch you on TV. And once daddy said a bad word when you fell down.”

None of the adults can help it, they start to laugh, and Ro just looks around confused until Kelley picks her up from behind again, and starts to tickle her.

“Come on, munchkin,” Kelley says, putting the giggling child back down, “I’ll race you to the playroom.” And then she’s off, running deliberately slow and exaggerating every step, Rowan close on her heels.

Marcus and Hope just watch them go as Amanda calls after them, “No running in the house, you two,” and shakes her head.

“So,” Hope says and turns to her brother, still slowly bouncing Tommy on her hip, “she’s certainly something.” 

But Marcus just laughs harder and nods. “Yeah,” he says when he catches his breath, “I thought you’d like her.”

\-----

Kelley, it turns out, is just a child in a grown-woman’s body.

Amanda, Marcus, and Hope sit around the big island in the kitchen while dinner finishes cooking, Hope trying to catch up on what’s been happening in her brother’s life since the last time they really, truly talked. She hears how the life on the ranch has been going as Marcus works to perfect his business model--a rough n’ ready retreat on a working ranch, perfect for people looking to recapture a little wildness in their lives.

So far, Marcus tells his sister, things have been going well. They’re booked full up at the moment, a family or two looking for some bonding experiences, a couple of businessmen who liked the idea of turning cowboy for their two-weeks vacation, a small group of Navigators, among others.

“Just like City Slickers,” Hope teases with a smile, looking down at Tommy, who’s still in her arms lazily drinking the last of his bedtime bottle, and smirking when her brother glares back at her.

Ever the older brother, he teases her right back in return, with a faux-stern “Don’t make me take my boy back.” But the grin as he takes a sip of his beer after soothes over the words and the irrational feeling in Hope’s stomach that had her wanting to hold her nephew even closer, never put him down.

“Don’t listen to him, Hope,” Amanda says, putting a basket of bread on the table, “is Tommy almost asleep? I’ll take him and put him down. Do you want to go find the girls and Andrew? Tell them all to wash up? We’re ready to eat.”

She finds Andrew--Marc’s step-son, from Amanda’s first marriage--easily, sprawled out on his belly on the floor of the living room, playing some video game, something with soldiers and explosions. And just across the hall she can hear happy, cheerful voices--Kelley and Ro.

“Hey,” Hope says from the doorway, “Andy, your mom said it’s time for dinner.” And with a silent nod, he saves the game and gets up. He gives her a slight nod as he passes her in the hall, and she remembers the shy, quiet boy from Marc and Amanda’s wedding. She hadn’t paid much attention to him then, but she remembers being impressed with how good Marc was in the role of dad, asking Andy for permission to marry his mother right in front of the minister, promising to never hurt her, to always love her, and the same for her son.

He’s taller now, much taller, and there must be a lot of his father in him, because the only thing he shares with Amanda are her brown eyes and blonde hair. And she knows--from the stories Marc’s told her over the phone--that life hasn’t been easy for him. Divorced parents, absent dad, single mom. But Andy’s a Solo now, in their hearts if not in name, and so she reaches out to clap a kind hand to his shoulder. And when he turns back to her, she sees that he definitely shares something else with his mother--that soft, sweet smile.

“Hi, Aunt Hope,” he says, something of the shy boy still about him, and then turns to head toward the kitchen again.

Across the hall, she peeks in the open doorway to see Kelley sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by blocks and dolls and big, thick, “won’t stain your carpets or your walls” markers. Ro is singing something in a high-pitched, sweet, voice as she brushes Kelley’s hair back into a loose ponytail with a big, plastic comb that Hope is certain belongs to one of the yarn-haired dolls on the floor. The woman’s been fully outfitted in costume jewelry--a big gaudy necklace, a bracelet covered in Swarovski crystals, and a mix of plastic and what must be thrift-store rings on her fingers.

It’s an adorable sight, one Hope is glad to have witnessed, and she regrets having to interrupt.

“Dinner’s ready,” she says softly, not wanting to startle them, and the pout that Kelley and Rowan give her is almost too adorable for words.

“Oh no,” Rowan exclaims, “I’m not done yet!”

But Kelley tells her to finish--”quick, quick, quick,” she says--and sits with her hands folded primly in her lap as Ro stretches up on her toes to place a bejeweled tiara on top of her head.

Andrew and Marc laugh when they get to the table, but Kelley wears the damned thing proudly throughout the whole meal.

\-----

It’s just after Marc asks Andrew how school had been that day that the conversation veers toward awkward again.

“So, Hope,” Kelley asks in a conversational tone, “what do you do?”

And for a moment, the whole table is silent--Marc with a forkful of mashed potatoes hovering before his mouth, Amanda turning to cut up some chicken for Ro while burying a laugh in the crook of her arm, and Andrew chokes as he struggles to swallow the big bite of chicken he’d just taken.

“But Kelley,” the teenager starts to say, only to begin choking again. But Hope misses the glare exchanged between her nephew and her new roommate, lost in the uncertainty of just how much she wants to reveal.

She misses, too, the look Marc gives Kelley, the surprised confusion in his eyes, and the slow, slow realization that blooms on his face as he gets an idea of what his employee is doing.

When she finally looks up from her plate and over at her brother, the odd look on his face is gone, and there’s simple a patient expression there, one she’s well familiar with. But instead of taking the lead, as she’s begging him to do with her eyes, Marcus just urges her to answer herself.

“I’m a soccer player,” Hope says after another short pause, “I play goalkeeper on the national team, and for Seattle in the league.”

And then she looks intently at the tablecloth, the simple weave of the threads. Because Hope knows what comes next. The slow recognition. The way their voices get quiet, and their questions turn into whispers. Oh, Hope Solo. That one. The one who got in so much trouble at the 2007 World Cup? The one who’s always so angry? The goalie who lost the 2011 Cup to the Japanese? Who got herself suspended from the team in 2015 because she was drinking and driving? The one who hit a fan last month?

It’s coming, Hope knows. It always comes. And she braces herself as best she can.

But Kelley only looks at her, intrigued. “Soccer,” she responds, and looks off into the distance like she’s trying to remember something, and Hope grips the tablecloth tight in her hands.

But for nothing. Because the expected response never comes.

“I’ve never watched it,” Kelley continues, “is that the one people always say is so dangerous?”

Across the table, Andrew snorts milk up into his nose, and then groans in pain, but by the time she looks up Kelley’s face is all innocence and Andy is excusing himself from the table, limping just the slightest as he goes.

Neither Marc nor Amanda will look at her at the moment, one burying his face in a napkin to blow his nose, and the other looking very interested in the basket of rolls she’s holding.

“Um,” Hope starts slowly, trying to decide how to answer. She’s honestly still a little uneven; her anxiety over the expected response is slow to dissipate. 

“Um,” she says again, “no, it’s not. Maybe you’re thinking rugby? Or football?”

When she looks over at Kelley, the other woman is smiling at her and finally, Hope feels her racing pulse begin to settle.

“Oh,” Kelley says, “well, maybe you can teach me about it sometime.” 

\-----

Dinner is over soon after, and Hope gets dragged upstairs by Ro for a bedtime story.

In the kitchen, after wiping the last of the dishes clean, Marc pulls Kelley aside.

“So, Kelley,” he says quietly, “since when do you need someone to explain soccer to you?”

There’s a guilty look on her face as she tries to explain.

“I swear, I’m not trying to mess with her, Marc. But when we first met at the house--and thanks for that, by the way, I was practically naked,” she pokes him hard in the chest.

“Owwww,” he says and takes an exaggerated step backward, “and why on Earth were you naked?”

“Because I thought I was alone in my home,” she hisses back at him. “But like I was saying, when we met, I pretended not to know who she was, and she looked so relieved.”

She looks up at him, her expression thoughtful.

“It just seems like she needs to be a little anonymous, Marc, and there’s no harm in me pretending not to know who she is. I mean, if you think about it, it’s true enough. Just because I know the famous Hope Solo doesn’t mean I know anything about who your sister really is.”

Marcus has a look of deep gratitude on his face.

“You’re a good one, O’Hara,” he tells her.

She gives him a wide grin.

“Just remember that at bonus time, boss,” Kelley says as they hear light footsteps coming down from the upstairs.

Hope pokes her head into the kitchen just then, seeing the two of them laughing at the kitchen sink.

“Hey, Rowan’s asleep and Amanda’s talking with Andy about some homework. Kelley, any chance you could drive me back to the house? I’m a little tired.”

Within minutes Marc is walking them out to the truck, a heavy bag of leftovers in hand because, he whispers loudly in Hope’s ear, “I’m pretty sure neither of you can cook worth a damn, so unless you want to forage for your dinner in the woods, you’re gonna need it.” 

Kelley just turns to stick out her tongue at him as she continues to walk--backwards now--and ends up almost tripping over a stone in the ground. And Hope and Marcus fill the quiet nighttime air with their laughter.

“Are you actually a child,” Hope manages to ask as she climbs into the passenger seat, still laughing, “or are you just undercover on some secret international child spy mission?”

But Kelley just sticks her tongue out again, and starts the truck and pulls out onto the dark dirt road that will take them back to her side of the ranch.

“Hey,” she says a few minutes later, as the lights from the main house fade from view, “so tell me. In soccer, how many points is a touchdown worth?”

And for a minute, as her mouth hangs open and she watches Kelley drive in the dim light of the cab, Hope isn’t sure whether she’s going to laugh or cry.


	4. Chapter 3

Hope’s sleep is troubled.

But she’s used to that by now. Being kept awake by the thoughts running through her head, waking up with her heart in her throat and struggling to catch her breath.

It’s so much darker out here in the country, even darker than her little hideaway home in Seattle. There’s no streetlights, no all-night convenience stores to clutter up the night sky with their light. There’s just the dark nothing, and the tiny bright flashes of stars. Standing out on the porch in the wee hours of the morning, heart still racing from the dream that woke her, Hope smiles, and thinks of all the generations of travelers, seekers, sailors, those same stars have lead safely home.

 _Maybe_ , she thinks to herself, feeling herself slowly calming down, _maybe one day those stars will have a path for me._

\-----

Kelley finds her a few hours later, wrapped up in a thick knit blanket that had been on the back on the couch, asleep in the wooden porch swing that overlooks the vibrant green grass, the tall pine trees in the distance, the mountains.

Hope’s curled up into herself, and her head’s fallen down onto her chest from where she’d rested it upon her palm to watch the night fade into day.

For a minute, Kelley debates over waking her--the mornings here are cool still, almost cold, and sleeping in that position can’t be comfortable.

But she decides against it.. They’re strangers yet, despite the fact that Hope saw almost all of her yesterday afternoon, and besides, Hope seems the skittish type. Like a horse still unused to the world around it, unused to the sound of human voices, the touch of their gentle hands.

Kelley’s afraid that if she were to put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder, carefully shake her awake, Hope would startle, would look up at her with wide scared eyes, like there was no peace for her, not even in her dreams, not even in the first moments of her waking.

So, instead, she ducks back inside and comes out again with a steaming hot mug of coffee, placing it on the small, low table next to the swing.

She takes a moment, hand hovering just over Hope’s strong shoulder, thinking maybe she should pull up the blanket, tuck it more securely around the sleeping woman’s body. But this, too, she decides against, pulling her hand back quickly to her side.

And then she quietly makes her way down the steps, setting off on a fast-paced jog.

When she gets back, sweaty and hot despite the chill in the air, Hope, and the mug, are gone.

\-----

She’d woken slowly, hearing the thud of the door against its frame, the quiet footsteps, through the thick fog of sleep.

But Hope hadn’t opened her eyes, she hadn’t been ready to face the day, to face the woman who’d given her a kind smile the night before, when they parted in the hall upstairs

Instead she’d pretended to be asleep, held herself still and kept her breathing slow and steady. She’d had years of practice, years of awkward moments with roommates on the road when it was easier to pretend she’d been asleep than admit she’d overheard a private phone call or something else embarrassing.

But the coffee, the coffee had made her smile, the scent of it, the gentle way Kelley had placed it just beside her head. And then, a moment, a pause. A single second when she could have sworn she felt the warmth of the other woman’s hand over her shoulder. The warmth, but not the weight. And then she was gone, hopping down the stairs and heading off.

Hope’d opened her eyes then, just to confirm that she was well and truly alone. But then she’d caught sight of a light brown ponytail bobbing away through the slats of the porch-rail, and she sat up to watch as her housemate jogged off into the distance, bright purple running shoes easy to spot along the dirt road.

She sat there on the porch swing, sipping carefully at the steaming coffee in its robin-egg blue mug, until Kelley’d disappeared into the dark shadows under the expansive golden yellows of the rising sun.

\-----

By the time Kelley gets back from her run, sweaty and panting as she toes off her shoes and walking barefoot in the thick green grass, the porch swing is empty.

Inside the house, the mug sits upturned on the drying rack next to the sink, and there’s a fresh pot of coffee brewing. There’s no sign of Hope, though.

Just an open door to a neatly made bed, suitcase sitting open at at the foot. And a damp towel in the bathroom, neatly hung to dry.

“At least she’s neat,” Kelley says as she takes a sip of her coffee and starts the water for her shower.

\-----

They don’t see much of each other for the first week, but they settle into a kind of routine anyway. Kelley leaves a mug of coffee for Hope--sometimes sleeping on the porch swing, sometimes on the couch, rarely in her own bed--before she goes for her morning run. And Hope makes sure that by the time Kelley gets back, a fresh pot is waiting, sometimes accompanied by a note: _eggs in the microwave_ , or _out of milk--will steal from Marc_. Things like that.

At night, they fall into an unspoken agreement--whomever gets home first heats up whatever leftovers Marc and Amanda have brought over, or tosses a frozen pizza in the fridge. The other cleans it all up. And if they eat together some nights, at the kitchen table or on the couch watching the weather report from the local news, it’s simply a matter of coincidence, of being polite.

They’re not friendly, but they’re civil. And it’s enough.

Of course, whenever Hope does something that gets on Kelley’s nerves--which isn’t often but has happened once or twice already--the younger woman falls back onto her new favorite hobby, annoying the goalkeeper with questions about soccer.

When Hope rearranges the fridge, and it takes Kelley longer than usual to find her creamer (it’s always been on the shelf right next to the milk, it’s never been in the door), she corners the taller woman that night in the kitchen and asks how many quarters there are in a game.

And when Hope stumbles in late one night, waking Kelley up from her nap on the couch (where she’d fallen asleep watching a Bundesliga match), she covers sleepily by telling Hope that she was just trying to learn more about the sport, and then asks her to explain the offside rule. Twice.

But her favorite, so far, is the morning she finds Hope snoring loudly in the porch swing again, and how when she puts the coffee down, unable to keep from laughing, Hope just opens her eyes and looks up to tell her crankily: _I take one sugar, not four, you addict_.

For that, Kelley’d thinks long and hard, weighing schemes all day long as she exercises the horses. And when she gets home, to a boiling-over pot of noodles for spaghetti and Hope stirring some sauce, she makes herself a big glass of chocolate milk and hops up to sit on the counter.

“So,” Kelley says, oblivious to the drop of milk dotting her upper lip, “tell me about being a goalkeeper. It’s the easy position, right? I mean, you just stand there and wait for someone kick a ball toward you.”

The glare Hope gives her in response is positively murderous.

\-----

Kelley’s filling out some paperwork in the tiny closet that serves as her office when she hears Marc’s voice at her door.

“Hey, I’ve been giving Hope a tour of the operational side of things today, thought we’d stop by and see the new colt.”

Behind him, she can see Hope looking into the stall just across the wide hall.

“Awesome,” Kelley tells her boss, standing. It’s not like she enjoys paperwork anyway.

She walks Hope through the stables, introducing the hands, explaining all the different things they do here away from the eyes of the guests, how the stable on the other side of the ranch is full of their gentlest, calmest, easiest animals.

“Because those wanna-be cowboys would end up on their asses in the dirt if we gave them anything else,” she says with a grin, and Hope grins back at her.

“Can you ride, Solo?” Kelley asks, a challenge in her voice.

But Hope just keeps grinning as she reaches up to scratch the neck of Chester, a beautiful quarterhorse in the stall she’s leaning against.

“It’s been awhile,” she answers, “but I’ve been told it’s like riding a bike.”

Kelley laughs at her. “Maybe we can find you one with some training wheels, just in case,” she teases as Marc starts to laugh as well.

“Hey,” he says, clapping a hand on his sister’s shoulder, “why don’t you show us that new colt now--have you named him yet?”

And for a moment, the younger woman is taken aback. She’d assumed he’d been kidding.

“Um,” she stutters, as she leads them over to the stall where the colt is still being housed with his mother, “nope. I figured you would want to do that.”

But Marcus shakes his head. “Nope, O’Hara, I told you you could do it.”

Inside the large stall, Diego looks up from where he’s cleaning the colt’s umbilical stump and gives them all a nod.

“This is Sal,” Kelley says, introducing Hope to the mare who moseys over to nuzzle at her ponytail, and Hope hides a smile behind her hand when the younger woman reaches into her pocket for a small treat.

“And that,” the stable-master continues, “is her son. He’s healthy and--”

But she’s interrupted by Diego swearing when the young horse nips playfully at his ear.

“--and,” she says, laughing at her employee’s grimace, “he’s got a bit of an attitude.”

“He’s gorgeous,” Hope says aloud, her voice even softer than usual, almost reverent, and Marc concurs.

“But, Kel, he still needs a name,” her boss insists. “Come on, I know you’ve been calling him something in your head, what is it?”

Kelley’s response is mumbled, and impossible to hear over the sounds of the stables, of the men and women working coming in and out, the chitter of the horses.

“What was that?” Marc asks, and his grin is more than a little wicked.

“Go on, Kelley, tell them,” urges Diego from inside the stall.

“Darth, okay, I call him Darth.” And her face goes bright red, the blush extending down the pale skin of her neck to her chest, and disappears under the V-neck of her t-shirt.

Hope’s the first to make a sound--a loud, barking laugh--and almost doubles over in amusement.

“Darth,” Marc asks, “like … Darth Vader?” His eyes are bright and it’s only a matter of time before he joins his sister in her hysterics.

“Yes, like Darth Vader,” Kelley admits, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes.

But just when she thinks she can’t be any more embarrassed, Diego chimes in again.

“Tell them why, Kelley,” he says, not even bothering to try and hide the laughter bubbling up from his chest.

With a big sigh, the red-faced woman reveals her reasoning.

“Because he’s all black, and because when he was born he had some mucus in his nose and his wheezing sounded just like Vader in the movies,” she admits. “I made a joke about him sounding like the character, and it just kind of stuck in my head.”

It’s a while before the laughter stops.

It’s longer before the last flush of pink fades from her skin.

Sometimes being the fair-skinned Irish kid really sucks.

\-----

Marcus eventually heads back to his side of the ranch, making noise about loads of paperwork and invoices to take care of. But before he heads out he pulls Hope into a tight hug and brushes a quick kiss over her forehead.

“Hey,” he tells her, “come over for dinner tomorrow. I’ll grill us up some steaks. You too, Kel. You’re both looking a little too bare boned for Mandy’s comfort.”

And then he leaves, a small cloud of dirt following him down the road.

But Hope hangs around, peering into the different stalls and talking softly to the horses who came up to investigate this new person. And while Kelley could go back to her office, could return to her paperwork and finish her monthly inventory, she doesn’t.

She stays, hangs around the stable and watches Hope move from stall to stall. She does this and that, updates the info on a whiteboard on one of the stall doors, sweeps up straw and manure in the aisle instead of leaving it to one of the hands to do later, dusts off the feed bins in the alcove between the training barn and the stable.

What she’s doing, she’s not sure. She’s not keeping an eye on Hope, not because she’s afraid the other woman will do something, get into some sort of trouble. But she’s curious, she’s been curious about the other woman since the day they met.

So Kelley watches out of the corner of her eye. Sees how gentle Hope is with the horses that Kelley considers her own, her charges, hers to watch over.

It isn’t until Hope reaches the last of the stalls, all the way on the other side of the barn--the quiet side that few people ever needed to venture into--that Kelley moves closer, readies herself to intervene.

“Her name’s Calamity,” Kelley says softly, coming to stand at Hope’s shoulder.

Inside the stall the horse hides in a dark corner, the only one not to come up and at least sniff at the new person who’s come to see her.

“Calamity,” Hope repeats, but she doesn’t laugh. Maybe she picks up on something in Kelley’s tone, or maybe she recognizes something in the frightened horse’s eyes. But she seems to understand that for Kelley, for this horse, Calamity is more than just a name.

“She’s mine,” Kelley tells her. “A guy I went to school with found her in a pretty terrible spot, called me up. When I first saw her she was this skinny, terrified thing. Afraid of other horses, afraid of people, afraid of her own damn shadow.”

Hope stands there for a moment, silent, and Kelley can feel the way the information affects her. The way she bristles, anger near-to-sparking off her skin, and then curls inward, as if in pain herself.

“God,” Hope whispers, “that’s tragic.”

“It is,” Kelley agrees, and she can’t look at the other woman. This feels too much like a private moment, and she knows that if she were to look up, to catch a glance of Hope’s face, she’d bear witness to the older woman’s naked vulnerability, her demons.

“I’ve been working with her,” she continues in a soft, slow voice that seems to set Hope’s nerves at ease, “slowly. And she’s getting better, less anxious. And now that she’s actually getting fed on a regular basis, she’s starting to look healthier as well.”

“What happened to her previous owner,” Hope asks, and there’s an edge in her voice, sharp and almost dangerous, “was he prosecuted?”

“No,” Kelley answers, and when she feels Hope tense up again, she lays a soothing hand on her arm, “we reported him, but it never went to trial. But Devon spread the word in the area, guy’s been ostracized by his neighbors and local business partners. So it’s not much, but it’s something.”

She feels Hope relax just the slightest under her hand.

“You’re welcome to come and watch some morning,” Kelley says, “Calamity’s usually my first stop. We could always use some company.”

The taller woman nods, and Kelley can tell that she’s considering it. That there’s some spark, some connection she feels to this beautiful, broken, creature.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be good for each other.

“Hey,” Kelley says, and reaches down to tug at Hope’s hand, “come on, roomie, I’m hungry. Let’s find something to eat.”

And it’s a surprise when Hope follows, when she lets Kelley lead them out of the barn and into the late-afternoon heat.

“I think there’s still some spaghetti left over,” the older woman says.

Kelley just groans.

“Not tonight, Solo. We’re going into town for some real food.” 


	5. Chapter 4

By the time they get to the restaurant Kelley picked--after showers and a change of clothes and the long drive into town--the skies have begun to darken, just the slightest. Just enough that the streetlights are slowly popping on, and the signs shine brightly against the dusky evening sky.

“The Rainbow Room?” Hope asks incredulously as they pull into the parking lot, “you’re taking me to a place called the Rainbow Room?”

Kelley smiles at her as she puts the truck in park. “Best BLT in town,” she answers and hops down.

“You’re taking me to a gay bar called the Rainbow Room because it has a good BLT?” Hope still hasn’t unbuckled her seat belt. “You know I’m not gay, right?”

Kelley’s come over to the passenger side where she stands at the open door and rolls her eyes.

“It’s not a gay bar,” she tells the other woman, “well, it’s not your traditional gay bar. It was a supper club back in the sixties, and then, yes, a local guy bought it and it became a gay and lesbian hangout in the eighties. And then, I don’t know, twenty years ago or so, it kind of became one of the better places to go, no matter who you were. Fabulous food, great entertainment, drinks and drinks and drinks. So everybody goes, and nobody’s going to ask you for your membership card, so stop worrying about it.”

“Now,” Kelley continues, “I’m starving, are you coming?”

And she heads off toward the entrance, leaving Hope behind to catch up.

“You know, I’m not either,” Kelley tells the taller woman who’d jogged to catch up to her, “gay, I mean.”

Hope just looks over at her. “Oh,” she says in response, “okay.”

“I don’t actually have a preference,” Kelley answers with a wry grin, and grabs for the door.

It takes Hope a second to get her brain working again, and another for her feet.

“Oh,” she says again, “oh.”

\-----

Dinner--BLTs and a plate of fries to share, with thick chocolate milkshakes to finish--actually is delicious. Maybe it’s not the best sandwich Hope’s ever had, but she’s pretty sure that it’s the best the little town has to offer.

“Okay,” she admits to Kelley, who smirks back at her from across the table, “you were right, this is pretty damn good.”

“Told you so,” her dinner partner responds, and Hope honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the other woman stuck out her tongue next. Still, she laughs in response.

Even better than the dinner, and maybe even more surprising, is the company.

Kelley is fun, and funny. She tells terrible jokes, and even with the half-way good ones she’s always forgetting the punchline, or laughing in anticipation of the end before she can even get there. And she has story after story to share about life on a ranch in the middle of nowhere; runaway horses, a barn cat who adopted a whole litter of tiny mice, the day that one of the hands--Jimmy--slipped and fell into two different piles of manure like something straight out of a sophomoric comedy.

And as she slurps up the last drops of her shake, Hope realizes that she’s spent the entire evening laughing, and smiling, and not thinking about soccer once.

But she’s learned a little about her new roommate during their dinner as well.

Kelley grew up a little more than an hour away, a quiet close-knit town where her father served as the local pastor and her mother worked as a teacher at the elementary school. A middle child with an older sister and younger brother, precocious of course, and the kind of trouble-maker whose charm and smile got her out of more than a few sticky situations.

Like the time she almost got her high school’s senior prom cancelled and then somehow got hailed as the hero when she saved it in the end.

Hope listens, and laughs, and rolls her eyes in amused disbelief at Kelley’s stories. And by the time the bill comes, Hope is as close to happy as she can remember being for the last several months. Maybe longer.

“My treat,” Kelley says from behind her napkin, and reaches for her wallet in the small bag at her side. But Hope beats her to it, counting out three twenties from the thin wallet she pulls out of her back pocket and handing them to their waiter.

“Keep the change,” she tells him and turns back to Kelley before she catches the surprised grin on his face.

On the way out, Kelley waves to one of the bartenders--a tall, thin man who nods in acknowledgement as he skillfully pulls a pint for a patron--and Hope wonders who he is to the woman in front of her. A friend? An ex? Just someone she knows from around town?

But then Kelley holds the door open for her on the way out, and the sight of the stars--so bright out here, even with the lights from town--leaves her breathless, and she forgets to ask. 

When they part later that night, Hope excusing herself just after they get back to the house to read in her room, their good-nights take on a softness that wasn’t there before, a genuine warmth that’s more than polite.

It’s friendly, and as Hope slowly walks up the stairs toward her room, she’s smiling.

For the first time since she arrived, she sleeps through the night.

\-----

And then, suddenly, there’s a new routine.

The morning after their dinner out, Kelley pads quietly down the stairs to find Hope waiting for her in the kitchen.

“I thought maybe I could shadow you around the stables today,” she asks tentatively--and there’s an uncertainty to her voice that would surprise even the people who thought they knew Hope Solo well. The older woman is standing behind the island, holding out a cup of warm, steamy coffee, and when Kelley lifts it to her lips she realizes it’s made exactly the way she likes it.

She’s surprised, like she hadn’t expected the other woman to pay attention to something like that. But maybe, Kelley thinks to herself, maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. She’s watched Hope over the past few weeks, she’s seen with her own eyes just how little gets past the athlete, how much the older woman sees, those bright eyes always watching, always taking everything in.

“Yeah, no problem,” Kelley answers, taking another sip of coffee and enjoying the pleasant warmth of it on her tongue, “I was just heading out on my run.”

“You could--,” she says, thinking about mornings she’s seen Hope running in the distance while working with the horses in the yard, “I mean, you could come if you wanted?”

The smile Kelley gets in return is worth the potential loss of her prized thinking time, when she really gets into the groove of her run and lets her mind wander as her feet--as her whole body--takes over in the easy repetition of running.

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t mind if I did,” Hope tells her, and steps out from behind the tiny island.

And now Kelley can see the tight black compression leggings the other woman is wearing--a little Reign logo just over her left thigh to match the one on her purple sweatshirt--and the pair of dusty Nikes that have taken up residence on the back porch, right next to her own Adidas ones.

“I mean, if you think you can keep up with me,” Kelley says and struggles to keep from laughing, cheeks turning pink with the effort.

Hope just looks at her for a moment, like she can’t believe Kelley would even suggest such a thing.

“You know I’m an athlete, right,” she counters dryly, speaking slowly, as if explaining something to a small child, “a professional athlete …”

Kelley, puts her coffee down on the counter, and lets the words fade off before giving voice to her comeback.

“Well, yeah,” she says, “but, I mean, you’re a goalie? How fast can you be?”

And she turns to grab her shoes from the back, leaving Hope standing behind her, mouth wide open in amused disbelief.

\-----

So on most mornings, they run together.

Sometimes they run in silence, just letting the day bloom before them. Other days, they chatter back and forth, bouncing from topic to topic as they please. Egging each other on to go farther, faster, to take the lead, until they collapse onto the dew-wet grass in front of their shared house, sweaty and panting.

Later, after they shower and grab something for breakfast--Hope: peanut butter toast and a banana; Kelley: Lucky Charms with water instead of milk--Hope follows the younger woman over to the stables and watches as she works with Calamity, or Darth, or one of the other horses under Kelley’s care. Every now and again, Kelley will call Hope over from where she sits, perched on the wooden fence or a bushel of hay, and teach her what she’s doing, how to approach a skittish horse, how to lead an excitable colt, how to brush them down after their training.

In the afternoons, Hope disappears, and Kelley continues her work--sometimes in the barn, sometimes in her office. But every evening, by the time she makes the short walk back to the house, Hope’s already home, and usually with an idea for dinner.

Turns out--despite Marc’s teasing--the goalkeeper can actually cook.

 _When there’s more than mustard and beer in the fridge, I can,_ she’d told Kelley before pushing her out the door with a list of items for the younger woman to pick up from the grocery store.

“Do I need to come with you?” Hope had asked with a twinkle in her eye. “Have you ever been to a grocery store before?”

Kelley just glares and stomps out into the rain.

\-----

“Hey,” Marc says quietly, sticking his head into Kelley’s office, “Hope around?”

But Kelley shakes her head. “No, she headed out about an hour ago, sorry.”

She’s surprised when he comes in anyway, pulling the door shut behind him.

“Good,” he tells her, and takes a seat on one of the rickety crates she’s got nowhere else to store, “because I wanted to talk to you.”

Kelley just looks back at him, and lets her face go blank. There’s a few things her boss could want to talk to her about, and she has no idea which is on his mind today.

“I wanted to thank you for everything you’re doing for Hope,” he starts, and she can hear the absolute affection, the genuine gratitude, in his voice. For his sister. For her.

“And not just for letting her stay with you, which has truly been a godsend for her peace of mind,” Marc tells her earnestly, “because staying with me and the kids, or in any of the cabins on tourist side of the ranch would have driven her crazy.”

Kelley nods because after a few weeks of living with his sister, she knows it’s true. Hope enjoys a certain solitude, a bit of privacy, in her life, and living with her older brother and his wife, their teenager and toddler and infant? Or next door to nosy tourists, old college friends reliving their frat days, or business-types trying to get back to nature for a week?

Hope wouldn’t have lasted long.

But honestly, Kelley feels like the gratitude is misplaced, if not unnecessary entirely.

“It’s not like I’m doing anything,” she says, reaching for the Diet Coke on the corner of her desk, “I didn’t use the spare room on alternate nights or anything like that.”

Marc shakes his head at her.

“You’re doing a lot, and you know it. I heard you just last week, when that delivery kid recognized her and started to pull out his phone. You shot him right down. Diego saw the whole thing, said the kid damn near peed himself. And from what I’ve heard, it’s not the only time. I’ve seen you two running together in the mornings, I know you’ve been showing her what you do with the horses and honestly, Kel? She’s doing a lot better than when she first got here. Already.”

“You’re good for her,” he says, “and I just want you to know that I see it, and I’m grateful.”

She can’t look at him, not right yet. Not with the bashful pink coloring her cheeks. Because Kelley knows that what he says is true. Hope is better--calmer, less afraid, more open--than when she arrived, and the thought that she might have had something to do with it? To hear that from Marc, who is her friend, whose respect she’s worked hard to earn over the years?

It means everything to her.

But still, she rolls her eyes a little bit in response, just to make the awkward desire to hug him go away. “If you say so,” she tells him in a wry tone.

But the smile in his eyes lets her know that he understands.

“Okay, and the second thing,” he says seriously, and she knows they’ve switched from the personal to business now, “is about that proposal you gave me a few months ago.”

Kelley feels her heart stop, her blood run cold.

She hadn’t forgotten about the proposal, the document she’d put so much time and thought and energy into, but as the weeks turned into months, she wondered if he had.

Apparently not.

“I’ve had my accountant look at it, and I’ve done some research,” Marc continues, and still Kelley can’t breathe, “and I want to give it a go.”

“Before you say anything,” he continues, holding out a hand, “this has nothing to do with the Hope thing. I told my lawyer to draw up the paperwork before I even knew she was coming. Your idea was solid, your research and your data impeccable, and honestly, I think it’s really going to be a great addition to what we do here.”

Still, Kelley is silent, and Marcus looks at her with concern in his eyes from across the desk.

“Kelley--,” he says, “Kel, are you breathing? Take a breath for me.” And while his tone is teasing, the words are not.

Finally, she does, takes a deep breath and gets up to give him a hug.

“You jackass,” she says with a laugh, “I thought you’d forgotten about it, I thought you were going to turn me down.”

But he just chuckles and hugs her back.

“Why would I do that?” he asks, “It’s a great idea. The O’Hara Rehabilitation Services at the Last Chance Ranch? I mean, it needs a snappier name, but it will be great. I figure we’ll start small, maybe five horses, pursue some of the partnerships with hospitals and therapists that you mentioned. See how it goes on the medical side for a year or two, maybe expand into behavioral therapy for at-risk kids if our initial test run is successful.”

Kelley can’t help it, she hugs him again.

“Maureen O’Hara,” she says as she pulls away. When she sees his confused look, she clarifies.

“The Maureen O’Hara Equine Rehabilitation Center,” she tells him, eyes glistening with unshed tears.

He nods. “Sounds pretty snappy to me.”

\-----

“So, I turn my phone back on and I’ve got a text telling me to be ready for dinner by seven, and to wear something fancier than sweats,” Hope announces, annoyed, as she reaches the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?”

But Kelley, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, doesn’t answer. She’s busy trying not to leave big clumps of mascara on her lashes as she applies her makeup.

“I have to shower,” Hope announces, now at the door of the bathroom they’ve been sharing, “can you do that somewhere else?”

Still, Kelley is silent, the tip of her tongue sticking out as she concentrates and tries to get the same delicately smokey look on her other eye.

The older woman sighs loudly.

“Fine,” she says, moving past Kelley into the bathroom before she pulls off her shirt and reaches into the tub to turn the water on, “whatever.”

Kelley has to redo her left eye.

Twice.

\-----

Marc can’t keep a secret to save his life, and Hope’s mood--she’s still pretty cranky by the time her brother and Amanda pull up in their car--doesn’t help much.

“We’re celebrating, Hopey,” he says with a delighted lilt to his voice, “O’Hara and I are going to be business partners. So stop grumping and get in.”

The older woman has the decency to look ashamed as she slides into the backseat next to Kelley.

“Business partners?” she asks, and then turns to her housemate with a whispered I’m sorry.

“Yep,” Marc answers, “you’re sitting next to the new commissar of the Maureen O’Hara Equine Rehabilitation Center, our very own Kelley O’Hara.”

Kelley looks over to her with and rolls her eyes. “We’re still working on the title,” she tells Hope with a smile.

“Wow,” the goalkeeper says quietly, and reaches over to take Kelley’s hand, squeezing it gently, “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

They sit like that for the rest of the drive.


	6. Chapter 5

It’s no one’s fault, not really. **  
**

Just a series of unfortunate coincidences and some terrible timing. A Navigator who wandered away from his nature hike, an open toolbox perched on a makeshift sawhorse table while one of the hands ate his lunch outside.

Harmless, really.

Until the adventuring Navigator stumbled into the stable, tripping over his feet and falling into the toolbox, sending it to the ground with a large clatter.

Inside her stall, where Kelley was carefully brushing her horse down, Calamity went wild.

The first thing Hope hears from where she’s outside feeding an apple to one of the horses in the pasture, is the crash, and then the boy shouting.

She runs inside, ahead of everyone else.

Her eyes adjust to the dimmer light quickly, and knows immediately that something terrible is happening. She can see Calamity inside rearing up to kick at the door of her stall, eyes wide and frantic, and behind the horse? A lump huddled against the far wall, a still lump wearing Kelley’s shirt.

But she can’t think about that, not in the moment. Because as Calamity hooves make contact with the stall door, it rattles precariously on its hinges, just in front of where the boy stands paralyzed with fear.

Hope lunges for him, grabbing his arm, the collar of his uniform shirt at the scruff of his neck, and pulls--yanks, really--him toward her. And then she runs toward the wide barn doors, shouting for Diego and Ben and Clara and anyone who can hear her.

The other horses are beginning to get antsy, skittish in their own stalls. But they’re not her concern right now.

Nor is the boy, safe now outside with Clara, who’s calling 911, and then Marc after.

No, Hope’s concern is Kelley, trapped in a small space with a panicking horse. Kelley, who hadn’t moved when Hope called out her name, just before turning and heading for the doors with the boy.

Back in the barn, Calamity is still screaming, and it’s the most terrifying sound Hope’s ever heard. Kelley’s still not moving in the back of the stall, and Hope offers up a silent prayer that the other woman is just making herself as small and non-threatening as she can on purpose, that Kelley’s just waiting out the storm the only way she can.

“Hey, girl,” Hope speaks softly, just the way she’s heard Kelley approach the horse when Cal’s more skittish than usual. “Shhhh, it’s just me, it’s just Hope. You know me, I come and hang out in the morning sometimes, watch you and Kel do your thing.”

Slowly, slowly, she approaches the stall and carefully holds out a shaking hand over the wooden door, waits for Calamity to settle, to stop rearing up, jumping around the stall. And as much as she wants to focus on Kelley in the background, wants to call out the other woman’s name again and hear her voice calling back, she can’t. She has to stay calm, has to calm the horse down first.

Hope breathes deeply, steadily, like it’s penalty kicks at the biggest tournament of her life. She feels her heartbeat slow, feels all her focus shrink and shrink until she can no longer hear the gathering voices behind her, the other horses in the building. Until she can only see Calamity, only hear the scared horse’s harsh, heavy breaths.

“There we go, Calamity, good girl,” she says, still in that soothing, gentle voice, “come over here by the door, let me see those pretty eyes.”

She has no idea how long it takes--it could be minutes, it could be hours. But she stands there as long as it takes, talking the horse down, and when Calamity starts to come closer, starts to sniff at her hand, Hope feels her eyes begin to water with sheer joy.

“Yes, good girl, that’s it,” she says, continuing to entice the horse to come to her, even as she feels someone press something into her other hand. It’s Diego, crouched down low in front of the next stall, just out of Calamity’s sight. He’s handing her a sturdy rope halter, holding onto the long lead, and she nods once, to let him know she understands.

It takes a few minutes more of soft, gentle words before Cal’s willing to nuzzle her soft, velvety muzzle against Hope’s near-numb hand, but once she does, Hope brings the halter up and slips it over the horse’s head with a quiet sob of relief. Her first acknowledgement of how terrified she is, how she can’t stop imagining Kelley hurt, in pain.

In a fog, she hears Diego’s whispered instructions--to lead Calamity out to the empty paddock--and Marc’s voice in the distance, telling everyone to stand back, to keep their distance. And if she listens intently, even further, beyond the people and the trees, the high shrill of a siren. 

When she catches her brother’s eye as she slowly encourages the horse to follow her out into the open air of the afternoon, his face is serious, his jaw clenched and tight. But she can’t say anything to him, can’t go to him and weep out her fear, her terror at seeing Kelley, a silent, still lump of flannel and denim and golden brown hair. Everything she’s come to learn that the other woman is not. Not the energetic, loud, always laughing woman she’s grown accustomed to spending her days with, her evenings.

In the paddock, Hope leads Calamity over to the water trough and fishes some treats out of her pocket.

The horse nips the peppermint twist out of her hands, and Hope can see that most of the fear has faded from Calamity’s sweet brown eyes. But her heart still races, and so Hope lays her head against the rough, stiff hair of Cal’s mane, in something almost like a hug. And she holds on, loosely, until she can sense that the horse, Kelley’s horse, is okay, is back to normal.

By the time she makes it back into the stables, the paramedics have arrived and are crowding Calamity’s stall.

“Hope,” Marc says quietly from her side, and pulls his younger sister into a tight hug. He’d arrived in time to see Hope confronting a rearing horse, nothing but the wood of the stall to protect her from those powerful legs, the sharp edges of those hooves. He couldn’t have been more scared if it had been Mandy, or Andrew, or Ro, or Tommy.

“Come here, you idiot,” he tells her, words spilling from his mouth harsher, perhaps, than he intended. But he’s still shaking, his heart is still racing, and if he comes across as angry instead of terrified, then so be it. “What the hell were you thinking, Hope? If that horse had busted the door you could have been killed!”

And deep down, Hope knows this. She’d known from the moment she turned and went back inside the building. Known from the second she saw the terror in Calamity’s eyes.

“I’m fine, Marc, really. Is--,” she stumbles over the question, unable to see past the collection of bodies working in the stall, “is Kelley okay? I couldn’t tell, she was so still.”

Her brother holds her tighter against his chest, tight enough that she can hear his heartbeat pounding underneath the soft cotton of his shirt.

“She’s alive,” he tells her. “As soon as you got Calamity out of there Diego rushed in. She was unconscious but breathing. Bleeding from the back of her head--she must’ve slammed into the back wall. Not sure about anything else yet.”

And then, from the stall, they hear voices. A woman in a dark blue jumpsuit comes out, followed by Kelley on a stretcher, and another EMT her head.

“Marc,” the woman stops in front of Hope and her brother, “we’re going to take her over to Mercy to get checked out.”

He reaches out to shake her hand. “Thanks, Jenny,” he says in a relieved voice. “Is she gonna be okay?”

She looks over her shoulder, and Hope can see Kelley’s legs moving under the blanket she’s covered up with as she’s loaded into the ambulance.

The EMT turns back to them, and she sounds confident when she tells them that Kelley is going to be fine.

“A concussion, definitely a few broken ribs. She needs a CT scan of her head, definitely, and the doctors will probably want imaging on her abdomen too, just to make sure there’s no internal bleeding. But she’s okay--she’s lucky, but okay.”

And Hope lets out a breath she didn’t even realize she was holding at the other woman’s words.

“Someone should come with us, for paperwork and in case the hospital needs more info on what happened,” Jenny tells them, and Hope can feel her brother nudge her forward from behind.

“You go, Hope,” he says. “We can get things calmed down here.”

But she must look nervous, or torn, because he backtracks quickly. “I can send Amanda over as soon as possible if you don’t think you can stay? It’d be a few hours at most.”

“No, I’ll go,” Hope interrupts him, “I can stay. I’ll call if something changes, but I’ll stay.”

Marc pulls her close again, still shaken, and brushes a kiss across her brow.

“Keep us updated, kiddo,” he says, and then she heads over to the ambulance and climbs in, taking a seat at Kelley’s feet.

In a minute or two, they’re off.

\-----

Kelley’s propped up in the bed of her room in the ER, eyes closed against the bright overhead lights. Her face scrunches up in pain with every breath, and her right arm’s suspended in a sling.

“Okay,” Hope says from where she sits in the hard plastic chair--the only other place to sit in the small curtained-off room, “next question: your first concert. And it doesn’t count if it’s followed by ‘On Ice.’”

In the bed, Kelley groans. “There’s no way the insurance paperwork needs to know that.”

But Hope persists. “It absolutely does, right here between height and allergies.” She pokes gently at Kelley’s legs with her toes, muddy shoes long abandoned in the corner of the tiny room when she propped her feet up on the bed. “Now, give, what was your first concert, O’Hara.”

Kelley opens her eyes to look over at the woman by her side, and then grimaces and quickly shuts them again.

“This is like one of those ‘what’s your porn name’ scams, isn’t it?” she asks. “You know my birthday now, my eye color, my mother’s maiden name … you’re going to steal my identity and buy a jet-ski, aren’t you?”

The older woman smirks. “Ohhhh, you’re avoiding the question. That means it’s something embarrassing. Please tell me it was a boy band. Which one, N’Sync? Backstreet Boys?”

A pink blush is spreading quickly down Kelley’s neck and despite the pain reflected in her eyes, an embarrassed laugh threatens to burst out of her.

“It was the Spice Girls,” she admits, and groans again, her good arm clutching her injured ribs through the hospital gown the nurses made her put on.

And Hope laughs, almost too loud for such a normally somber place.

“Okay, Miss O’Hara, looks like all your scans came back clear,” the doctor says as he comes back in with her chart. “No blood where there shouldn’t be blood. You’re going to have quite a headache for the next couple of days, and you’ll want to take it easy while those ribs are healing, but there’s nothing to indicate that you won’t make a full recovery.”

Hope listens carefully in case Kelley’s still having a hard time focusing, wanting to make sure she doesn’t miss any of the doctor’s information, cutting in when he tells them that she can go home if there’s someone who can watch over her for the next twenty-four hours.

“There will be someone,” she says, “I mean, I’ll be there.” 

Kelley gives a small nod when Hope turns to confirm that the younger woman is okay with her offer, and then grimaces.

“Great,” the doctor answers, noting something on the chart, “I’ll get the discharge papers ready and a nurse will be in shortly with your aftercare instructions.”

He heads out, but not before giving Hope a sharp look, and she knows that he definitely is aware of who she is. But he doesn’t say anything, just gives her a professional nod, and heads back out into the hallway.

“Hear that, O’Hara,” Hope says, trying to make her voice sound more cheerful than tired, “you’re getting sprung soon.”

Kelley’s eyes remain closed, but she gives a small smile. “Damn,” the injured woman mocks, “there goes my sexy sponge bath.”

\-----

“Shortly” turns out to be almost two hours later, and by the time Marc’s dropping them off at the house--after a quick drop in at the nearest pharmacy for Kelley’s prescriptions, and a convenience store for some emergency necessities--it’s past nine already.

“Careful, careful,” he says as he helps Kelley up the steps and into the house. Every step is slow and deliberate; even still, Kelley bites at her lip to keep from crying, and clutches gingerly at her ribs with her uninjured arms.

“I know you said no,” Marc tells her quietly, giving Hope a knowing look as she holds open the door for them to pass through, “but the offer to carry you still stands.”

For several more steps, it seems that Kelley’s determined to persevere, to press on. But as they stand before the stairs up to the second floor, the bedrooms, she changes her mind, giving Marc nod as her eyes crinkle and the tears finally begin to fall.

He scoops her up into his arms, whispering in soothing tones as Kelley lets her head rest on his shoulder and gives in to the pain, the frustration, of the day.

Hope’s already in the bedroom, pulling back the blankets on the bed and getting the room ready for the other woman when Marc appears at the door.

In just a few moments, Kelley’s sitting on the edge of the bed, Marc telling her not to worry about anything, just to focus on getting better.

“Okay,” Hope says once they’re alone, “let’s get you into something comfortable and then I’ve got your pills right here.”

But getting undressed isn’t easy between the broken ribs and the fractured collarbone that are making even the slightest of movements terribly painful. And after a few moments of trying to get her shirt off, Kelley concedes defeat, quietly calling for Hope to come back in from the hallway where she’d gone to wait.

“I need some help,” she says, and there’s a defeated embarrassment coloring her face, “I can’t get my shirt off.”

The taller woman just nods and takes a quick look at the shirt Kelley’s wearing.

“I don’t know how they got this back on you at the hospital,” she says, “but I honestly think that the best thing would just be to cut it off.”

Soon, she’s carefully maneuvering Kelley’s injured arm into a soft-flannel button-up, and then, as professionally as possible, helping the other woman out of her dusty jeans and into a light pair of shorts.

Within minutes of taking her batch of painkillers--accompanied by some of the emergency ice cream Hope picked up on the way back from the hospital--Kelley’s eyes are starting to droop. Soon, she’s dozing as the older woman throws the discarded clothing into the hamper in the corner, and gathers everything she can imagine she’ll need to play nursemaid, and settles onto an old swivel desk chair, steeling herself for the long night ahead.

\-----

It’s just after three am when Hope wakes from her light sleep to hear Kelley whimpering in pain from her bed. 

“Hey, it’s not time for your head-check yet,” she teases gently as she quietly pads over to the other woman’s side. “Is it your ribs? Pain?”

“Everything hurts,” Kelley whispers, “I can’t sleep on my side because it hurts to much, or my stomach, or my back. Everything hurts.”

The way her voice cracks in aching frustration resonates with an almost-physical pang in Hope’s own chest. This isn’t the Kelley she’s used to--laughing, smiling, teasing, and so, so, so strong. And for a moment, Hope wants to put the fear of God in that boy. _See,_ she’d say, _this is what happens when you don’t do what you’re supposed to. People get hurt._

But it’s not his fault, not truly, she knows. It’s not anyone’s fault.

“Okay, let me just get you some water for another dose of pills, and then we’ll see if we can figure something out. But first, let’s run through the checklist--name, age, president, age you were when you stopped believing in the Easter Bunny …?”

And the soft, grateful smile she gets in return makes everything worth it, the alarm on her phone set to go off every hour on the hour, the crick in her neck from trying to find a good way to nap in desk chair.

Everything.

“So,” Hope says as she puts the empty glass back down on the bedside table, “I have an idea. It might be a little awkward, but maybe you’ll be able to sleep better.”

“I haven’t broken my ribs in years, not since college, but the last time it happened,” she continues, “I couldn’t sleep either. I was dating this guy and he suggested I try sleeping sitting up, and he sat behind me the whole night to help make sure I didn’t start to fall over.”

And it takes a moment, but Hope can see the exact second when what she’s suggesting clicks in Kelley’s head. They’re silent for a breath or two, and then Kelley agrees to give it a try.

When the sun finally starts to rise and throw its rays in through the slats of the window blinds, the two women are fast asleep, Hope propped up against the headboard and Kelley leaning back against the older woman’s chest, held securely in Hope’s arms.


	7. Chapter 6

Hope’s witnessed some terrible patients before. Whomever came up with that old “doctors make the worst ones” adage had clearly never spent any time with an athlete desperate to get back on the field. Hope herself has skirted the fine line between recovery and re-injury once or twice, pushing herself harder than she should have to get back into her kit, into her boots and gloves.

But Kelley? Kelley’s worse. The worst she’s ever seen.

It’s only been a week since the accident and already Hope’s threatened to restrain her several times.

The first day or two are easy. With Kelley buzzed out on painkillers and Amanda dropping by to make sure she was okay, Hope is mostly responsible for making sure the younger woman gets fed and watered on a semi-regular schedule. Helping her get comfortable on the couch, or keeping the house as quiet and calm as possible.

But now that she’s feeling better, now that the headache has started to fade and the long, slow process of healing has begun, the younger woman is antsy, restless. From her spot on the couch, Kelley watches Hope move about the house with envy, with big puppy-dog eyes that the soccer player finds strangely compelling. And entirely too adorable.

“What if I just walk,” Kelley asks, in a voice that’s more pleading than anything else. “I could walk and you could jog beside me.”

Hope just looks over at her from where she sits on a kitchen chair, tying her shoe.

“Kelley,” she says with a sigh. A patient sigh. Because she’s torn. She understands. She’s been there, sidelined by her body’s need to be still, to be quiet and calm and patient.

Hope’s never been very good with patience.

And maybe that’s why she does what she does.

Gives in.

Kind of.

“How about this,” Hope says, smiling gently, “I’m going to go for my run but this afternoon, we’ll get out of the house. Escape from these four walls for a while.”

Kelley looks so hopeful, so pleased, and Hope knows that she’s done something right. Something good.

“Promise?” the younger woman asks, biting at her lower lip.

And Hope wants to laugh--at how young Kelley looks right now, how innocent and delicate, like everything she wants in the world is riding on this offer from a woman who’s really just a little more than a stranger--but she doesn’t.

“I promise,” she says instead. And she means it.

\-----

“So this is where you hide away in the afternoon,” Kelley says appreciatively.

They’re sitting under the shade of tall, thick-leaved green ash, sun at their backs, just off the bank of the little creek--too small to be called a river, truly. There’s nothing but silence around them, the kind of silence that stretches back generations, centuries.

Above them, birds chase each other just under the clouds, and butterflies flit and flitter through the tall grass, always just out of reach. And every now and then, a breeze swoops down into their little valley from the mountains in the distance, whooshing through the trees, the leaves.

It’s peaceful and perfect. And somehow, it fits Hope. It fits her.

For the first time since the older woman had startled her in her own house, Hope seems completely content. Completely at home in her own skin.

Kelley tries to watch her from the corner of her eye, she can’t help it. She’s fascinated by this version of Hope, this light and easy version of the woman she’s come to know piece by slow, maddening, piece.

There’s a fishing rod at the foot of the camp chairs Hope had carried on their walk from the road where they’d parked the truck, and between them, a backpack with a bottle of water, a couple of apples.

And next to her, there’s Hope herself. Eyes closed as she leans back in the chair and lets the sun filter down through the leaves onto her face. She’s smiling, and Kelley thinks of flowers and photosynthesis and the way petals unfurl themselves slowly, gradually. Until they’re open, bearing their beautiful faces, their innermost secrets, to the sky.

“Hmmmm,” Hope answers her and continues to soak up the sun.

She’d be content to just sit there, Kelley knows. To be quiet and be still.

But Kelley’s itching to move. To talk.

Four days of being basically confined to the house have eaten away at her patience.

“What do you do out here,” she asks, poking at a clump of dirt with a twig, “are we waiting for something to happen? Is there going to be a tumbleweed rolling by at any moment?”

Almost against her will, Hope laughs.

“Oh, my God,” she says, “are you five? Can’t we just sit? Enjoy the beautiful afternoon?”

And Kelley plays along, because why not?

“I’m so bored,” she whines, and sticks out her lower lip.

With a heavy sigh, Hope reaches over into the bag on the ground between them. “Well, sometimes I fish,” she says, “but that’s kind of off the menu for you right now. So your choices are crossword puzzles or a biography of Catherine the Great …”

It’s not even a choice.

“Crosswords,” Kelley answers grudgingly, holding out her good arm for the New York Times collection that the other woman hands over.

The rest of their afternoon is quiet. Hope casting out into the small creek and arguing back and forth with Kelley about answers to the more difficult clues. It’s pleasant, companionable, and, honestly, fun.

They surprise each other, and find that they enjoy being surprised.

And when the afternoon light turns golden, Hope packs up the chairs, her pole, the bag with the almost-empty water bottle and the apple cores and the books.

“Did you have a good time,” she asks, steadying Kelley at the elbow as she climbs up into the passenger seat of the truck.

“I did,” Kelley smiles down at her, “I was still sitting and doing nothing, but at least I wasn’t sitting on the couch today.”

“You didn’t do nothing, you learned what the answer to ‘spanish skating figure’ was, didn’t you?” Hope smirks over at the younger woman, not missing the tired look in Kelley’s eyes, the hint of pain just at the edges of her soft hazel irises, just the slightest tint of green today.

Kelley sticks out her tongue. “That was a trick question and you know it, Solo.”

But then she smiles over from where she’s leaning up against the car window.

“What about you,” the brunette asks, “did you have fun?”

And Hope thinks for a moment before answering.

“You know what,” she replies, voice raised like it’s a surprise even to her, “I did.”

Kelley looks over at her, confused. “But you didn’t catch anything?”

The older woman smiles to herself.

“Of course not,” she tells Kelley, “there aren’t any fish in that creek.”

The look Kelley gives her is ridiculous, absolutely incredulous, and Hope answers the obvious question before she can ask it.

“Sometimes it’s not about the fish, Kel. Some days it’s just about the sun and the breeze and casting out into the river knowing that nothing’s going to come back out.”

The other woman just looks at her with thoughtful eyes.

\-----

Soon enough, Kelley’s well and truly on the mend.

She still can’t ride, but she heads out to the stables in the mornings with Hope anyway, catching up on paperwork and spending time with the horses. With Calamity.

The first time, the first since the day of the incident, Hope keeps careful watch on the other woman. Hovers, even.

It doesn’t help that Kelley springs it on her in the morning, just as Hope gets out of the shower after her run.

“Hey, can you help me with something,” the younger woman calls down the hallway.

Hope finds her in the other bedroom, a pair of worn-in work jeans--still unbuttoned--clinging to her hips and old, holey flannel shirt hanging loosely off her shoulders. She’s holding out a bra with a sheepish look on her face.

“What’s going on,” Hope asks slowly.

“I’m going to work today and I can’t get my bra on,” Kelley says, eyes full of fire and determination. “I need your help.”

It takes a few minutes for Kelley to talk the other woman into it. But with the promise that she won’t even think about getting up on a horse, she convinces Hope to help her.

“I’m sorry if this is awkward,” Kelley says as Hope helps draw the shirt off her shoulders, being ever so careful not to jostle the younger woman’s broken collarbone, her still-tender ribs.

But Hope shakes her head--Kelley watches her reflection in the mirror on top of the bureau.

“It’s not,” she answers, “you get over nudity pretty quickly in the locker room.” 

But this isn’t a locker room, and even Hope can’t deny that the air between them is charged, that the skin beneath her fingertips is soft and warm, that the scent of Kelley’s hair is clouding her thoughts.

Hope’s touch is gentle, and somehow electric, along Kelley’s shoulder blades, and the brunette closes her eyes, wondering if that will help to dispel some of the intimacy she feels growing between them in this moment. She knows there’s more, knows that Hope feels it too.

The way those strong hands linger a second longer than they should, skitter along the freckles that dot her shoulders …

The sharp little intake of breath, almost a gasp …

How quickly Hope pulls her fingers away when she realizes what she’s been doing …

It’s as obvious as the pink that flushes Kelley’s chest, her cheeks.

“There, all good,” Hope says, and lifts a clean button-up flannel for Kelley to slide her arms into.

At the stables, everyone treats Kelley with kid gloves. And she appreciates their kindness, but it quickly starts to annoy her.

“Hey,” she calls over to Hope, who’s sitting with her feet up on Kelley’s desk, “Marc told me you’ve been skipping your runs and working with Cal in the mornings. Thank you for that.”

Hope grimaces in response. “Asshole, he wasn’t supposed to say anything. I made them all swear.”

“Well, thank you anyway,” Kelley tells her, “I really appreciate it.”

The faintest red tinge appears along Hope’s cheekbones, and it makes Kelley smile. Hope’s kind of--no, absolutely--adorable when she’s being bashful and modest.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want your training schedule to suffer a setback.”

And Kelley could press further, could poke and prod at the goalkeeper, lavish her in thanks and gratitude. She is thankful, and she is grateful. But she doesn’t. She won’t repay Hope’s thoughtfulness, her kindness, with cheap teasing.

Instead, she slowly, slowly stands, and holds out a hand to the other woman.

“Come with me?”

\-----

“There we go, that’s my Calamitous Cal,” Kelley says, reaching out to stroke at her beloved horse’s muzzle. “I know I’ve been gone for a while, but I’m back now. And soon we’ll start working together again. I’m just glad you’ve been such a good girl for Hope. She says you’ve been doing really well with the halter--I’m so proud.”

Kelley rubs her forehead against Calamity’s forelock when the horse lowers her head, a sign of gentle submission, of trust.

For both of them.

Over in the corner, Hope leans up against the wall of the stall, just watching carefully. Like she was ready to leap in if Kelley’s life were threatened again.

And it makes Kelley smile. Inside and out.

“Thank you,” she mouths over at the other woman.

Hope just crinkles her nose.


	8. Chapter 7

They go over to Marc and Amanda’s for dinner one night, and after everyone fills themselves up with hamburgers that Marc’s cooked for them on the grill and the cobbler that Hope had baked the day before, everyone moves to the large deck behind the house to enjoy the first pleasant night after nearly a week of rain.

Kelley sits and watches Hope bounce Tommy on her lap, laughing and giggling with the little boy as he reaches out to poke at her cheeks whenever she stops. And Rowan’s sprawled on her belly on the floor, crayons spilled out everywhere around her, coloring a picture for Miss Kelley, whose owies still hurt too much to play hide-and-go-seek, as Marc had had to remind the little girl.

Marc and Amanda sit near the French doors that lead into the kitchen, chatting about something or other. Until Amanda slaps at his knee. “Stop,” she says, laughing, and then rises to take Tommy from her sister-in-law, to take him upstairs for his bath.

“Thirty more minutes, little girl,” she tells Ro, patting her daughter on the head as she passes, “and then you’re getting dunked.”

And Kelley smiles at the girl’s exaggerated “Mooooom,” mimicking a tone she’s heard her older brother use, undoubtedly.

And then it’s just Hope and Marc, Kelley and Ro on the deck. Watching as the wind rakes through the trees with its stiff, invisible fingers.

Until with heavy footsteps, Andrew comes out onto the deck and throws a book down onto the picnic table, sighing in frustration.

The boy collapses into the chair his mother just vacated and runs a hand through his unruly hair.

“Marc, you ever read _The Crucible_?” he asks, and his stepfather lets out a strangled laugh, looking over toward Hope with desperate eyes.

“I--uh, I was never much of a reader in school,” Marc admits, and Kelley has to admire his honesty. “But, you know, Hope’s probably read it.”

“Have you, Hope?” Andrew asks earnestly.

His sister looks startled, and immediately her eyes narrow, like she’s not quite certain she’s willing to be volunteered for this. But Marcus pleads with her, those identical eyes, and she can’t quite say no to her older brother.

Or his kid, apparently.

“Yeah, Drew, I did.” And her voice is kind. Patient.

Andrew looks over at her excitedly, like she’s a buoy amidst the choppy waters.

“I have a test tomorrow on it and _The Scarlet Letter_. And I read them both, but I still don’t think I understand them. And _The Crucible_ ’s the worst,” Andrew says in exasperation. “It’s not even a story, it’s just people talking to each other.”

“Well, first of all …,” Hope starts to answer him, and then looks around that the night sky. It’s not dark yet, not quite. But it’s not light out either.

“Tell you what,” she tells him, “why don’t we go inside. We can sit at the table and I’ll walk you through them both.”

Mandy comes down for Ro soon after, and then Marc and Kelley are left to watch as the stars begin to peek out.

They talk about their upcoming venture for a little while, their plans and how real they’re becoming. And then there’s a loud laugh from the kitchen behind them. And when they look back, Hope and Andrew are hunched over a small stack of open books at the kitchen table, the lights from further inside the house giving them incandescent halos.

Somehow, the moment feels soft. Fuzzy. Like a photograph just out of focus. Hope, laughing with her nephew, explaining something with wild, animated hands.

Smiling down at him as he furrows his brow and bites at his lip.

“What was Hope like as a kid,” Kelley asks quietly. 

She’s wondered for a while now. Wondered what kind of child had grown into the strong, beautiful, loving woman who’s sitting there in the kitchen. Wondered if her smiles were always so rare and yet so genuine. If her walls had always been so tall, so thick. If she laughed more, if she loved easier.

Marc tilts his head to look at her, and then back to his sister.

“She was--she was Hope, you know?” he answers. “She was our parents’ last chance, I think. Their last big try at being happy together. It was a lot of responsibility for a little kid, to be someone’s happiness. A lot of pressure. And she’s always been sensitive, really, truly sensitive. Even as a little kid, she took it all on herself.”

He sighs, and continues. “Of course, it didn’t work. Our parents weren’t right for each other. Life wasn’t easy, didn’t make things easy for them, but it wasn’t just the poverty and the stress that drove them apart. They just didn’t like each other very much, and they tried to hide it for us, tried to work things out, but they just couldn’t. Hope, of course, blamed herself. If she’d been better, if she’d been smarter, faster, quieter, louder. Of course, I wasn’t much help. I wasn’t around enough. I was older and I could escape with my friends and my team.”

“Hope, though, there was something about it. Something that drew people to her as much as it pushed them away. The way she could read them, I think. I think that’s what it was. She has these eyes--well, you know, it’s like she’s looking straight down into your deepest secrets. And you want to tell her everything, all your sins. It freaked people out, still does.”

And Kelley nods, because it’s true. She knows exactly what he’s talking about.

“So I think she was lonely a lot as a kid. For a long time, I thought she preferred it like that, preferred books to people. Mom would make me walk her to the library once a week after school, and she’d always check out so many books that I had to help carry them home for her. She didn’t have friends, but she had books. When I look back, I feel bad. She must have been so desperate for a friend, for someone to talk to, someone to understand her. Honestly, I think that’s why she stuck with soccer at first. Because for two hours a night three times a week, she had a team. She had friends.”

Kelley doesn’t say anything yet, just thinks over what Marc has told her. It hadn’t surprised her at all; she’d mostly come to the same conclusions herself.

But it gives her a fuller picture of the woman she’s been sharing her house with. The woman who’s begun to slowly, slowly share more of herself with Kelley.

“She’s pretty amazing, your sister,” Kelley tells him before swallowing down the last of her beer.

Marc lifts his bottle in a toast.

“That she is,” he agrees, “that she is.”

They sit out there for at least another hour, Amanda eventually coming to join them, while Hope and Andrew work in the kitchen. And when the two are finally done, books finally put away, Andrew comes out beaming, a smiling Hope following closely behind.

“All prepped for that test tomorrow,” Mandy asks from where she sits on Marc’s lap, resting her head against his shoulder.

“Oh, I think he’s got it down,” Hope says quietly, almost proudly, as Andrew gives them all a confident nod.

“Thanks, Hope,” Marc says, “I appreciate it.”

But Hope laughs his thanks away.

“Oh, no thanks necessary,” she tells them, “it was strictly a business arrangement. I’ve got camp coming up and Drew here is going to help me practice penalties.” She looks over at the boy with serious eyes, but Kelley can see the way the corners of her mouth are struggling with the urge to curl up into a smile.

\-----

The drive home isn’t long, but Kelley takes it slow for some reason. She’s not quite willing for the day to end, maybe. Not with Hope looking so relaxed there in the passenger seat, so comfortable. Eyes closed and so still that if Kelley didn’t know better, she’d think Hope was asleep.

“So, you’re a big fan of the Puritans,” the younger woman teases.

Hope smothers a chuckle.

“Gross miscarriages of justice and timeless tales about the way a community can devour itself through its own lies and prejudices,” she says dryly, “what’s not to like?”

They pass the turn that will take them off the ranch’s main road, the one that will take them toward their house.

If Hope notices, she doesn’t mention it.

“Are you looking forward to camp,” Kelley asks carefully, unsure if she’s treading on forbidden ground.

But Hope answers her.

“Looking forward,” she repeats Kelley’s question, “I don’t know if that’s quite the right way to describe it. But I’m looking forward to being back in goal. And my therapist thinks it will be a good test of how I’m doing.”

The younger woman isn’t quite sure how to respond to that. She’s not even entirely sure that she heard Hope right.

And maybe Hope senses the awkwardness that sits heavily between them, because she sighs and turns--as much as the seat and seatbelt will allow--to look at Kelley while she drives.

“I,” Hope starts, and then swallows hard, “I don’t know what you heard or what Marc told you. But I haven’t been well--I haven’t been okay--for a while now. And it became a problem for me on the team, on both teams. I got violent, I got overwhelmed and I threw a punch at someone I shouldn’t have. The teams drew up an agreement that if I used the suspension to get help, they’d do what they could to keep me on the roster. So twice a week I Skype with a therapist. I have a prescription for anti-anxiety medication that I take every day. And another for emergencies, for panic attacks, that I carry with me wherever I go. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m trying to get better.”

Her voice fades off into the darkness, and Kelley’s heart clenches at the quiet despondence she’d heard in Hope’s words.

And she can’t--she won’t--let Hope think that. That somehow her suffering, her struggle, makes her weak. Makes her lesser. Makes her unworthy.

“It’s not,” Kelley says, and reaches across the console between them to take Hope’s hand in her own. “It’s brave. It’s courageous. You’re strong, Hope, you’re so strong. I’m in awe of you.”

And when she squeezes Hope’s hand, just to let her know that she means it, that she means everything she says, she feels the other woman squeeze back.

Tentative at first.

But then again, stronger.


	9. Chapter 8

She’s not going to think about it.

_(She can’t stop thinking about it.)_

\-----

It was a mistake.

_(It didn’t feel like a mistake.)_

\-----

It shouldn’t happen again.

_(She wants it to happen again and again.)_

\-----

It’s been almost three weeks since she said goodbye to Kelley at the airport, since she leaned across the center console of the truck and kissed the other woman.

Thinking about it now, as the captain announces their final descent into Missoula, Hope honestly doesn’t know who had been more surprised--Kelley, or her. And she still--still, despite hours spent laying awake each night and staring up at her hotel room, trying to figure out what she’d been thinking, what she’d been feeling in that single moment--could not believe that it had happened. That she’d put her hand up on the dashboard and turned toward the driver’s side.

“Have a good tri--,” Kelley had started to say, but anything else was lost to Hope’s lips, the sweet, tentative, testing way she pressed her mouth against the younger woman’s.

And time held still as Hope’s palms began to sweat, as her mind began to race with angry, embarrassed thoughts.

_What had she done? How could she have done this to her friend, this woman she’d only known for such a short time?_

But, in the second that she was going to pull away, already terrified of trying to have to explain, she felt Kelley’s hand come up against her cheek. And then the other woman was kissing her back, mouth moving enthusiastically against Hope’s until they broke apart with a shared moan.

“Fuck,” Kelley said, wiping a thumb across her lower lip, “your flight.”

It had felt like a bucket of cold water over her head, a reminder that the real world, the world outside Kelley’s truck, outside Marc’s ranch, outside the barn and the open fields and the sweet freedom of anonymity, was closing in on her again, calling her back into it.

It set her heart racing for an entirely different reason, one far less pleasant than the kiss.

Hope had grabbed for the door-handle and was halfway out of the truck when Kelley took her arm and pulled her back.

“Hey,” she said, and brushed away a bit of hair that had fallen out of Hope’s ponytail, “it’ll be okay, Hope, I know you’ll be okay.” And when the goalkeeper didn’t answer, just kept looking back at Kelley’s bright hazel eyes--green today, like her shirt--it was the other woman’s turn to lean across and press a kiss on Hope’s lips. Just over the corner of her mouth, and then another along the high, sharp line of her cheek.

“Hope,” Kelley whispered against the older woman’s skin, “it’ll be okay, you can do this.”

And those words had carried Hope all through the airport, through the crowds and the fans, through the weeks of training with her team and the game against Mexico, the press conference after.

Kelley believed in her. Kelley believed she was strong, that she could manage her fears, conquer them. Kelley had kissed her back and told her everything was going to be okay, that she could survive.

For Hope, it was enough.

\-----

Marcus drops Hope and her bags off at Kelley’s house, but not before inviting her over for dinner later that evening.

“And bring Kelley,” he says as he pulls back onto the dirt road that will take him back to the main house and his office, “she’s been mopey ever since you left and Mandy’s made a big double-layer cake--chocolate frosting. That oughta cheer her up, right?”

Once she’s unpacked and showered and thrown a load of laundry into the wash, Hope slips into a pair of thick denim work jeans and her sturdy leather boots, and walks the short path behind the house to the stables. She tells herself it’s just to see if she can lend a hand, to see how things have been going in her absence, but as soon as she arrives one of hands points her over to the covered arena.

“She’s in there,” Jim tells her, “been working with that new colt all day. Not sure who’s more ornery right now, her or that horse.”

Hope laughs, and heads in that direction, throwing a wave and a smile back at him when he calls after her with “It’s good to have you back, Hope.”

 _It’s good to be back_ , she thinks to herself, a little surprised. Somehow, she feels like she has a place here, with these people, her family.

She feels like this could be a home.

She felt at home with her team, too, Jill and Carly and Pinoe and the rest of the girls, the staff. But this is different. This is the kind of home where she can relax, where she can take off that impenetrable persona, where she can let her guard down.

This is the kind of home that feels real.

The door to the training barn is open, enough for Hope to slip through, anyway, and once her eyes adjust to the dim, dusty light, she can see Kelley standing in the middle of the large space, staring down the young horse who’s standing across from her. Darth, and Hope rolls her eyes again at the ridiculous name, almost looks defiant there, like he knows exactly what he’s doing to the trainer’s patience as he refuses to let her close to him.

Kelley’s back is to her--she’s unaware that she has an audience--and Hope leans up against the wall of the tack room in the corner of the barn, half-hidden in shadow, to watch the other woman work. She’s not hiding, she’s not delaying the inevitable, she’s taking a moment to watch Kelley, this woman who intrigues her, interests her, so much. Who seems to have slipped through the invisible cracks in Hope’s armor, broken through what everyone else believed to be unbreakable.

She’s taking a moment to bask in everything she feels when she’s in Kelley’s presence. The things she can’t quite put words to yet. And not for a lack of trying.

Except that everything she thought she’d figured out in that hotel room in Mexico falls to pieces as she watches how gently, how lovingly Kelley guides Darth to accept her touch. The soft way she speaks to him, too quiet to hear the words from where Hope stands, but loud enough to hear the soothing tone.

It’s beautiful.

Kelley’s beautiful.

And not just physically--though she is that, Hope admits to herself as she takes in the way those tight, dusty jeans cling to the perfect curve of Kelley’s ass, the strong muscles of her thighs, hard from years of riding horses, hard work on the ranch. The steady way she holds out her forearm, her hand, and beckons the colt to her, to come to her.

What’s beautiful about Kelley exists in the way she cares. The way she loves.

Because Hope’s never met anyone who loves more, who loves better, than Kelley. Horses, dogs, stray barn kittens, the baby bird she’d found abandoned along the path to their house. Her stable-hands, the kids she teaches how to ride, Hope’s brother and sister-in-law, Rowan and Tommy and Andrew. Her own family, the postman in town who’s known her her entire life, the woman she’d met at the grocery story just last week.

Everyone was important to Kelley, everyone was just another person to make a home in her big, beautiful heart.

Hope, too, had a place there, held safely in Kelley’s thoughts and deeds.

But she’s realizing that maybe--just maybe--the spot she holds is just a little different than the others.

She’d wondered before, before the airport and the kiss. Wondered if Kelley thought kindly of her, if she was just another in the long list of people the younger woman cared about.

The kiss had taken care of that.

Because Hope knows, knows with a certainty she’s felt about very few things in her life up until now, that as much as she gives it away, in that respect, Kelley is careful with her heart. Careful with who she lets into it, into its deeper, more meaningful corners.

And when she’d kissed her back, sitting in the drop-off lane at the terminal, Hope’s question was answered.

She was more.

And as terrifying as that thought had been, as terrifying as it still is, it inspires her.

It intimidates her.

But it makes her brave, too. Brave in the silliest, simplest of ways.

So she watches, a small but genuine smile on her face, as Kelley coaxes the young horse out of his fear and into her hands, as she teaches him how to accept what she is giving--comfort, trust, love.

At some point, Hope knows, Kelley feels her presence, catches a glimpse of her standing in the shadows. She knows because she watches as the trainer’s movements get just the slightest bit stiff for a moment, as her otherwise sure feet falter on the soft-packed mix of sand and soil.

But she doesn’t acknowledge it. Kelley doesn’t turn to say hello or even look in Hope’s direction as she puts the young horse through the last of his training for the day.

It’s not until Darth is rubbed and brushed and fed and watered that Kelley turns to Hope, standing in the wide lane in the middle of the stable where she’d followed the younger woman out from the training arena.

“You’re back,” Kelley says softly, her voice uncertain. Gone is the confident, headstrong woman who stared down the stubborn colt in the training barn, the woman who stood her ground as he struggled against her hold, unused to his movements being directed by someone else.

“I am,” Hope answers, and trusts that Kelley can hear the wrestle of emotion and desire in that’s simmering beneath her skin.

The other woman looks at her, head tilted just the slightest, as though she’s seeing something new in Hope, something she’s not quite certain she understands. It’s almost tangible, the weight of Kelley’s eyes on her; sharp, as if that gaze--brown today--can cut through all of the goalkeeper’s many layers, her numerous walls.

“I was going to call,” Hope starts, trying to fill the silence that has suddenly become uncomfortable, become unbearable. She feels vulnerable, like she’s been exposed to the world, naked for anyone to see.

Except it’s only Kelley. Kelley’s eyes and Kelley’s pursed lips and the heat of Kelley’s body.

“I was,” she continues, “but I didn’t, I couldn’t--I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss. And I had to stop thinking about it because I had to focus. So I couldn’t call you. But I wanted to, Kelley, I--”

But whatever else Hope is going to say is lost under the younger woman’s busy lips, the way she can feel the rough wood of a stall against her back, the underside of her arms, as Kelley presses her against it.

“Kelley, I--,” Hope tries again, but the trainer doesn’t let her say anymore, and a sound that’s almost a growl escapes from the other woman’s throat..

“You need to stop talking,” she hears Kelley say against her mouth.

\-----

Kelley’s hand is trapped, held tightly between Hope’s strong thighs, when they hear the door to the barn open and the sound of boots upon the concrete. And it could be a tragedy, because Hope is so, so close. Kelley can feel the way each thrust of her fingers, each swipe of her thumb across the taller woman’s clit, sends a trembling helplessness through Hope’s body.

And in the space of a second, her eyes have gone from heat and need to cold, cold fear, and Kelley can feel how the older woman’s muscles have tensed, gone rigid, and not with pleasure.

She pulls her mouth away from Hope’s, and kisses a gentle line up to whisper in the other woman’s ear.

“It’s okay, they’re not coming this way,” Kelley says, and already the footsteps are fading off into the other direction, toward the other end of the stable. But she waits until Hope relaxes into her again, until she nods that it’s okay to continue, that she’s okay to continue.

Permission given, Kelley begins to move again, thrusting steady and deep into Hope, ignoring the rasp of the other woman’s zipper against her arm as she brings Hope closer, and closer to completion.

It doesn’t take long.

The steady pace, the feeling of Kelley’s fingers buried deep within her, the gentle staccato of Kelley’s thumb on her clit ….

The sweet nothings Kelley whispers into her ear, the press of their bodies together, even mostly clothed ….

The inferno begins to build from within her, the very center of her, builds and builds and builds until it ignites the stars behind her eyes, the fireworks in her fingertips, and with a soft breathless cry, she comes, wet and hot and so, so beautiful.

Her knees tremble once, twice, and then give out, and Kelley takes her weight, holding her up against the rough, firm wall behind them as Hope’s head drops forward onto her shoulder. And maybe it’s awkward, and maybe they’ll fall, but for the moment, Kelley holds Hope safe, and lets her struggle to get her ragged breathing under control again.

But when she feels the wetness against her neck, soaking through the light cotton of her shirt over her shoulder, Kelley realizes that Hope’s crying. That the shudders she feels wrack through Hope’s body aren’t the aftershocks of a particularly powerful orgasm, but Hope’s attempt to bury whatever it is she’s feeling right now, to force it back down inside of her.

“Hey, hey,” Kelley says, slipping her hand out from Hope’s jeans and slowly lowers herself to the straw-covered ground, bringing the other woman down with her, “are you okay? Did I--?”

She can feel Hope shake her head from where it rests on her shoulder, and it sets Kelley’s worry at ease, at least.

They sit together, Hope holding tight to the smaller woman, slowly calming down, as Kelley rubs a hand soothingly up and down her back. Until with a sniff and an shy, embarrassed smile, Hope pulls back to lean against the wall of the stall.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, with wet red eyes and cheeks, but Kelley just shakes her head.

“No, don’t,” Kelley tells her, asking again if Hope’s okay, looking at the taller woman with kind eyes, past all the walls that normally keep everyone from seeing too much.

Hope’s voice is soft, softer even than normal, when she answers.

“I’m okay,” she tells Kelley, and she means it. “It’s just--it’s just been a long time,” she admits, and looks down to where the younger woman sits between her legs, playing with a piece of straw.

And because, and it comes as an honest surprise to her, Hope goes further, gives a little more of herself to Kelley.

“Longer, even, with a woman,” she says, and her smile is shy but true, and Kelley laughs quietly, her fair skin flooding pink as she blushes.

It just might be the cutest thing that Hope has ever seen, those pink cheeks dotted with pale brown freckles, the way Kelley bites at her bottom lip as she looks up through her red-brown lashes.

“Same,” the brunette answers, and then suddenly she’s up on her knees, face-to-face with Hope. And then Hope is tilting her head forward, covering Kelley’s mouth with her own, unable to keep from tasting those soft lips again.

It’s the sound of the door, footsteps, again, that has them pulling apart. And Kelley smiles, and brushes a fleck of straw out of the other woman’s hair.

“We should probably go before someone actually comes looking for one of us,” she whispers, and moves to stand, taking Hope’s hand in her own and pulling the taller woman up. She has to stifle a giggle when Hope’s still-unzipped jeans start to slip down her lean legs.

“Here, let me help,” Kelley tells her, and slowly draws the zipper up, fastens the button at the waist, trying not to focus on the way Hope’s abs tremble as her fingers brush over them. And when she looks up, thumbs still hooked in the belt loops of Hope’s waistband, she sees the fire--banked, but still burning--behind those piercing blue eyes and knows--

They’re not done yet.


	10. Chapter 9

_// Marc: hey, hope, u coming to eat //  
_

_// Marc: hooooooppppppppeeeeeee //_

_// Marc: Missed call //_

_// Marc: Missed call //_

_// Marc: Missed call //_

_// Marc: u alive? //_

_// Marc: Mandy sys to call 2mrrw //_

\-----

_// Marcus: u seen hope, K? //_

_// Marcus: Missed call //_

_// Marcus: Kell? //_

_// Marcus: whr r u we r starvng //_

_// Marcus: im eating your pc of cake //_

_// Marcus: … cake … //_

\-----

It’s late.

Or maybe it’s early.

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

Nothing more than this room, the ceiling fan rotating slowly above them, circulating the air, warm even now in the dark of night.

Hope reclines against the headboard, a pillow tucked behind her back for comfort. And Kelley lounges against her, bare back resting along the older woman’s front.

Kelley gives a contented sigh and tangles her fingers up with Hope’s, bringing their joined hands up to rest on her chest, just over the still-rapid flutter of her heart.

“Is this a reminder?” she asks, running her fingers over the delicate script on Hope’s wrist, “Or a promise?”

But Hope’s response is a lazy, questioning _hmmm_ , and when Kelley tilts her head up to look at her, she’s helpless to do anything but smile softly. Hope’s eyes are almost closed, and there’s a smile on her face, tired, but satisfied.

She looks exactly how Kelley feels. Warm and sated. Comforted. Whole.

“This, your tattoo,” she says, and rubs her thumb over Hope’s thin, strong wrist again, tracing over the letters, the little curls and swirls of ink. “A kind of permanent identity bracelet? Or something else?”

Hope looks down at her wrist, the tattoo she had done there a few years ago.

It had been a spur of the moment decision a few years ago, right after the World Cup loss. As she stood between what she thought was the before and the after of her life. Before the World Cup loss. After the World Cup loss.

In her anger and grief at their heartbreaking loss to Japan, she’d made mistakes. She’d done things that she would later regret.

But none more than her almost-marriage. The solace she’d thought she found in an old college friend.

Yet, still, she’d come to her senses. Posting bail for her fiance on the morning of their wedding had shaken her, had caused her to think and reflect.

_Was this what she wanted? Was Jerramy who she wanted? Is this the life that would fill that ache, that wanting, deep inside of her?_

The answers--to everything--had been _no_.

No. It wasn’t what she wanted, he wasn’t who she wanted.

No, it wasn’t her life.

The tattoo, a spur of the moment _fuck you_ to the universe, had felt like the first right thing she’d done in years.

“It helps me to remember,” Hope says softly.

Kelley doesn’t ask, just shifts the slightest bit, just enough to keep looking up at those sharp blue eyes. She knows that Hope won’t share unless she wants to, unless she feels comfortable enough. And she’s willing to wait.

“I’m a goalkeeper, so I’m the last line of defense. Everyone else on the field has someone behind them, someone else to watch their back. Until the ball gets to me.”

And there’s something in Kelley that aches to hear this, because she knows what Hope’s saying, what Hope’s truly saying.

She’s alone.

She’s always been alone.

It’s something Kelley’s sensed from the first moment she saw Hope standing there in her home. Something she knows people talk about when they talk about Hope. That she’s a loner, that she’s an island. But everyone else assumes it’s Hope’s doing, that it’s manufactured and deliberate.

But Kelley knows--Kelley’s learned--it’s anything but.

There’s a part of Hope that believes she’s broken, that believes she deserves the way she’s talked about in the world of sports. In the world of celebrity.

In the whole world, Hope doesn’t believe she’s anyone’s first choice. She doesn’t believe that there’s anyone looking out just for her.

 _Solo_ , beautiful as it is, is a heartbreaking reminder, Hope’s personal apothegm: _Trust no one but yourself_.

Kelley is silent for a moment. Still.

And then she brings Hope’s wrist up to her lips, traces the delicate lines in soft, wordless vows. Things she can’t say yet to the other woman, but things she feels--things she knows--nonetheless.

_You are not alone. You are not alone. You have never been alone._

_You are loved._

\-----

In the morning, Kelley wakes first.

There’s a unfamiliar but persistent tickle at her nose, and when she opens her eyes, grimacing and frowning against being pulled out of her pleasant dreams, she realizes what it is.

Hope.

That long black hair splayed out around the older woman’s bare shoulders.

And it all comes flooding back to her, the night her half-asleep brain had convinced itself was only a dream.

They’d slept together--they’d more than slept together.

This morning Kelley knows the scent of Hope’s skin, knows its taste and its warmth, the way her muscles ripple and coil and tense. She knows the sweet sound of Hope’s breath as she shudders and shivers and moans out her pleasure, the wild and muddy sea of Hope’s eyes as she comes.

There’s a pleasant ache in her thighs, and the burning memory of nails digging into her back as the other woman clutched at her. And if she looks down, Kelley knows, she’ll see the constellation of love bites Hope had left behind when it was her turn to taste and tease and take.

“What are you doing,” she’d gasped out breathlessly as Hope moved her mouth slowly across Kelley’s chest, licking and sucking at the younger woman’s skin.

Hope had raised her head only the slightest, just enough to meet Kelley’s eyes with her own. “I’m playing connect the dots,” she said, and smiled against Kelley’s skin.

Lower and lower, Hope went.

“I don’t have any freckles down there,” Kelley had said helpfully. But Hope had ignored her, had just continued on her path.

And then, for the longest time, Kelley couldn’t say anything at all.

They’d fallen asleep soon after Hope crawled her way back up, retracing the path her lips had taken right up to Kelley’s mouth. And after a long, sweet kiss--the kind of kiss that warmed Kelley’s whole body, that made her want to forget the all too near call of the early morning sun, the daily tasks that beckoned, everything outside of the bed they shared--Kelley’d lain down on her side and watched as Hope succumbed to the long day, as her eyes blinked heavier and heavier, until they fell for the last time.

It makes her smile to realize that they’ve sought each other out in the night, in the dark. That at some point she’d reached out for Hope. That at some point, Hope had turned into her, tucked her body into Kelley’s warmth and pulled the younger woman’s arm tight around her middle. As if she were afraid one of them--both of them--would fade away into the night if otherwise.

Kelley feels Hope shift under her arm, stretch out her legs, and she knows that the other woman is slowly waking up, that her time to indulge in the sweet cozy softness of waking up next to her... 

Of being able to press her lips to the goalkeeper’s shoulder, just over a thin surgical scar, an injury long healed...

She knows--this sweet, quiet morning time is coming to an end. 

“Hmmmm,” Hope breathes, smacking her lips as she hooks an ankle around Kelley’s leg idly.

She’s not awake yet, not fully. And Kelley feels the tiniest bit like a voyeur, watching Hope at her most vulnerable. Her most innocent.

It feels intimate.

Far more intimate than she probably has any right to witness.

But she can’t tear her eyes away, can’t bring herself to slip her arm out from under Hope’s body and slide out of the bed, to give Hope the privacy to wake up on her own terms.

Instead, she holds the older woman in her arms, feels the slow ins and outs of her lungs, the steady beat of her heart. Until, with a start, Hope wakes.

\-----

They agree not to make a big deal out of it.

They agree to keep it between themselves.

They don’t say anything about it not happening again.

They both know better.

\-----

The days slip, one into the next.

Hope makes her excuses to Marc about missing dinner-- _she’d been tired, she’d fallen asleep, she’d never gotten the chance to mention it to Kelley_ \--but she knows the look he gives her in response. The big brother stare.

Still, he doesn’t say anything. Not to her. And not to Kelley, as far as she knows.

Kelley, who smiles at her with that knowing look. The one that says _I remember, I know_. She’s been seeing a lot of that smile lately.

After their runs, the mornings when Kelley slips into the shower with her, kissing her senseless under the hot, steamy water.

In the stables, when Hope tags along, hands trailing accidentally-on-purpose along Kelley’s back, her arm, the curve of her ass. Until they’re alone--hidden away in the tack room, or an empty stall, or that one time on Kelley’s desk with the door shut and the younger woman biting at the fabric of Hope’s soft flannel shirt in a desperate attempt to be quiet, to not draw attention to them.

The back of Kelley’s truck, a couple of blankets laid out for cushioning as they watch the stars skip across the sky, as they make out like teenagers in the middle of an empty field, gentle laughter drowning out the hooting of owls, the chirping of the crickets.

Even in their most innocent moments, even when they’re simply walking along the worn path toward the stables, or when Kelley pushes off her paperwork to spend the afternoon watching Hope fish and arguing over the answers to whichever crossword they were working on that day.

The hardest days are the ones around other people, when they watch themselves, temper themselves. Just in case. Just because.

Because so far this is pleasant and fun, this thing they’re doing. But it’s theirs. Right now, it’s just theirs.

And so they try, they try hard, not to act differently around everyone else.

Except sometimes Hope forgets and lets her hand sit just at the small of Kelley’s back as they walk from stall to stall to greet the horses in the morning.

And sometimes Kelley spends too much time watching Hope as they all sit around the table at Marc’s, or lets her toes run up and down the worn denim of the older woman’s jeans, or tangles their fingers together as she’s passing the basket of bread.

If they could see anything but each other, they’d know.

They’re not hiding anything.


	11. Chapter 10

There’s another camp, shorter this time. Just a week and a half away.

Kelley spends the time antsy, burying herself in paperwork, in her work with Darth and Calamity, in long meetings at the bank trying to secure the loan for her half of the rehabilitation center.

By the time Sunday rolls around, Hope’s anticipated return just a few short days away, she’s cranky and irritable and frustrated. Tired of loan officers and credit checks, tired of grant applications and trying to put into words what hope and opportunity her planned facility could offer people.

When Marcus knocks softly at her front door that afternoon, she’s fed up with the whole process, and starting to doubt whether she can pull off everything she’s said she wants to do.

“Hey,” Hope’s brother says, standing in the doorway, “can we talk?”

She invites him into the kitchen, and sets about making some coffee, all the while trying not to let her mind run away from her on all the possible reasons he could want to talk.

_Maybe he’s realized the therapy program is a mistake._

_Maybe he wants to pull out, to back off from their plans._

_Maybe he knows about her and his sister, their--for lack of a better word--relationship._

“So,” he starts once they’re both sitting down at the small kitchen table, “I wanted to talk to you about Hope’s birthday on Thursday”

Kelley’s sigh of relief makes him laugh, and her blush.

\-----

Kelley’s tasked with picking Hope up from the airport late Thursday afternoon, something she would have volunteered for anyway. They’ve been apart for over a week now, and she misses the taste of Hope’s skin, craves the feel of the goalkeeper’s lips along the curve of her neck, the sweet spot Hope had discovered almost immediately that first afternoon.

At the airport, Kelley waits at baggage claim nonchalantly. But her hands sweat nervously, and she chews along the inside of her cheek--a bad habit since childhood--as she taps her foot impatiently.

The plan has landed, the baggage carousel has made several rounds, but still, there’s no Hope.

Until suddenly, carry-on in hand, the tall woman appears, eyes darting around the busy area. And Kelley can tell the exact moment that Hope sees her, the little secret smile that Kelley’s just now realizing how much she missed.

Because over the past week and a half, it wasn’t just the physical intimacy she missed with Hope, but those little moments that she’d gotten so used to, so accustomed to, so comfortable with. Those moments that meant nothing until she’d realized, in their absence, how close to everything they’d become. The shared coffee in the morning, their quiet walk to the stables each morning, the way they’d started to sit together on the couch in the evenings, Hope’s head in her lap, or her feet tucked under Hope’s legs, and watch tv.

And then Hope’s in front of her, and it takes everything Kelley has not to grab onto the older woman’s shoulders and leap, to wrap her legs around Hope’s waist and bury her hands in that thick, silky hair as she reacquaints herself with the taste of Hope’s mouth.

But she manages. She tempers the desire, momentarily. Long enough for them to get to the truck in the parking structure, until they’re pulling out and onto the highway, heading out of the city and toward the quiet fields, the patchy woods. Until they’re far enough into the middle of nowhere that Kelley can pull off onto a quiet little drive.

“Hey, there, stranger,” Kelley says with a little quirk of her mouth. But before she’s even gotten the last word out, Hope is leaning over the center console, and with a soft sigh from the goalkeeper, and her hand gentle on Kelley’s cheek, they’re kissing again.

And she tastes exactly as Kelley remembers. Sweet and strong, mischief and home.

“I missed you,” Hope whispers as they pull apart.

When they pull up in front of Marc and Amanda’s, balloons and streamers hanging from the roof of the porch, Hope just looks over at Kelley, lips swollen and kiss-bruised.

“Happy birthday, Hope,” Kelley says with a smile.

\-----

Dinner is a fun affair, Marcus and Hope playfully talking over each other to share childhood stories. Andrew spends most of the night laughing, in-between telling Hope about how the soccer coach at school mentioned the possibility of moving him up to varsity next season.

There are presents, of course. A great big colorful drawing from Tommy and Ro, with Amanda’s neat penmanship annotating the more abstract drawings from her son. Ro, on the other hand, narrates the whole story for her.

“And that’s the sock ball--”

“Soccer ball,” Marc corrects his daughter gently.

“--sock her ball,” Ro continues, oblivious to the amusement of the grownups, “and there’s Aun’ Hope …”

Hope _ooohs_ and _ahhhhs_ in all the right places, holding Tommy in her lap.

There’s a couple of shirts from Marc and Amanda, some superhero Blurays from Andrew who swears that she’ll love them.

And from Kelley there’s a large box that Hope peers inside cautiously, like she’s half-afraid something will come popping out at her.

But nothing jumps out. And when she sees what’s inside, Hope just starts to laugh, big, deep belly laughs that make Tommy squeal with delight and Ro giggle.

“So you can be a real cowgirl,” Kelley says, eyes bright with amusement, as Hope pulls out the large, black cowboy hat.

“Don’t worry,” Kelley whispers later, as she helps a slightly tipsy Hope into the cab of the truck, “your real present is back at the house.” 

\-----

“You lying--” Hope says, stumbling over the words. She gapes at the sight before her, the woman standing there at the open door of the closet. 

Kelley’s smile is wide and sly. She knows exactly what Hope is thinking, exactly what she’s doing to the woman sitting there against the headboard. She takes a step forward, another, swaying her hips deliberately, seductively, and watches as Hope licks her lips unconsciously, as the older woman bites at her lower lip and swallows back a moan.

“You have my jersey,” Hope says through clenched teeth, voice light with awe, heavy with the growing ache that’s settled between her legs, “You knew exactly who I was, from the very beginning … this whole time, who I was, what I do? You knew everything ….”

The words fade away into the cool evening air, caught on the restless breeze that sets the curtains fluttering, bringing just the slightest chill to Kelley’s bare thighs.

“Of course I knew,” Kelley tells her, eyes sparkling with happy amusement, “big, bad Hope Solo. Two-time Gold medalist, World Cup winner, the cornerstone to US Soccer’s dominance for the last fifteen years.”

She moves closer, closer, and grins as she sees how tightly Hope’s fingers are clutching at the pillow held in her lap, the white-knuckled grip the goalkeeper has on it. With every step, every deliberate sway of her hips, the bright green fabric of the jersey brushes against her upper thighs, where it falls to rest right below the juncture of her legs.

“Why,” Hope asks, unable to lift her eyes from where they’re locked, staring at the way her number rests over Kelley’s breasts, the way the chill of the room has plumped and perked the younger woman’s nipples, enough that she can see them straining against the shiny fabric, “why did you pretend not to know?”

She thinks back,, embarrassment adding to the heated pink of her cheeks.

“Kelley,” Hope says with just the hint of ire in her voice, leaning forward, “you made me explain the offside rule to you like six times! You kept referring to goals as touchdowns!”

The younger woman can no longer keep from laughing. She grabs her belly and doubles over as she laughs loud and free.

“Oh, I know,” she tells the goalkeeper in-between breaths, “and trust me, it was hard to keep pretending. But you were so sweet and patient every time, even when you were so frustrated you had to bite your lip to keep from yelling.”

Kelley takes another step forward, knees bumping into the edge of the mattress, and watches as Hope’s breath hitches. But the raven-haired woman will not be distracted. It’s too important.

“Kelley,” Hope says, reaching out to toy with the edge of the jersey, skimming her fingers just under the hem, “why did you pretend?”

Before she answers, Kelley lifts one knee onto the bed, then the other, slowly moving forward until she’s kneeling over Hope’s legs, until Hope can feel the tantalizing warmth of her inner thighs hovering just over her.

This time it’s a whisper, soft and desperate.

“Kelley--”

The younger woman sits back gently on her heels, on the strong, hard, muscled legs beneath her, and the smile has become shy.

“At first it was the attitude, your head-bitch swagger--”

And at that, Hope laughs loudly, like she hasn’t a care in the world.

“--but,” Kelley continues, “then it seemed like you needed it, like not having to be The Hope Solo all day every day was good for you. So I kept pretending.”

It stuns her, how easily Kelley can read her, how she seems to know exactly what Hope is feeling, what she needs. And it happens again, she feels that warm, homey feeling that seems to fill her whenever she’s around the younger woman. It spills through her body, stretches into her limbs. She feels soft and gentle and light, all the things she’s long forgotten how to be.

Kelley just watches the emotions play across Hope’s delicate blue eyes for a moment, soaking in how beautiful this woman is, how precious. And right now, in this moment, how delightfully, how deliciously, hers.

“You know,” she says, breaking the comfortable silence after a little while, “we’ve met before.”

“Yeah?” Hope asks, fisting her hands into the jersey Kelley’s wearing, tugging gently, until Kelley bends her long, graceful neck down, close enough to nuzzle her nose against the high, firm line of the older woman’s cheekbones.

“Mmmmhmmm,” Kelley hums, “back before London. A friendly with Brazil.”

Hope kneads strong fingers into the muscles of Kelley’s ass and smiles at the groan that escapes from the other woman’s lips.

“I was wearing my jersey--your jersey--,” the brunette continues, “and afterward you came up to the fence where the fans were all waiting.”

The goalkeeper feels Kelley sink into her, feels the pleasant weight of the other woman settle onto her.

“It was so loud,” Kelley says, words punctuated with a gasp as Hope leans forward to kiss at her jaw. “Everyone wanted your autograph, or Abby’s, or Alex’s. Men and women, teenagers, kids--they were all screaming for you guys, holding out programs and jerseys to get a signature.”

Hope trails her hands up the firm line of Kelley’s back, so gentle, barely touching as she traces the divot of the younger woman’s spine.

The gasp is louder this time, and Hope smiles as Kelley tilts her head back, lost for a moment in the sensation of the other woman’s tongue dancing to the rhythm of her pulse.

“And did you get your autograph?” Hope asks, happy to have some control back, some power.

“What, you don’t remember me?” Kelley teases, dropping her head to capture the darker woman’s lips with her own.

And, God, there’s nothing that Hope wouldn’t give to be able to answer ‘yes,’ to think back to those desperate months on the lead-up to London and remember the impish, sweet, gleeful girl. She can picture it in her head, Kelley’s innocent, childish joy. The sweet smile, the laughing eyes. She would give anything to have that memory, to build a shrine to it inside herself, someone who understood her, some kind shoulder to lean on, to know the Hope that so few people ever take the time to know. Some brightness to light the dark of the months that followed.

She wonders what would be different if she'd met Kelley back then, met her and gotten to know her. What mistakes she might not have made. What new regrets she'd have instead. Because Hope knows that the person she'd been back then, the person she is trying to grow beyond, wouldn't have--couldn't have--been ready for this beautiful woman sitting in her lap. Couldn't have loved her the way Kelley deserved to be loved--fully, completely, above all else.

To be honest, even now, with the warm, wet feeling of Kelley's breath against her neck, the memory of the first soft whimpers she makes when she comes filling Hope's head ... even now she's not sure she's ready, not sure she's capable of loving the other woman the way she needs to be loved.

But there's one thing Hope does know: she's ready to try.

"And did you get your autograph," she asks again, teasing her tongue along the corner of Kelley's mouth, "was I nice, at least?"

She can feel Kelley smile, the way her lips lift into a gentle curve.

“You were fierce,” the younger woman reminisces, “and sweaty, and your eyes looked tired. Not the kind of tired like they did when you first arrived, but just the normal tired after a long, hot game. And you were grumpy, a little bit at least, because Marta kept breaking through your back line. But you smiled when I handed you my jersey, and you didn’t roll your eyes when my roommate asked if we could get a picture with you, so I’d say you were pretty well behaved. At least considering …”

Her smile is sarcastic but genuine as she lets her words trail off teasingly, and Hope can see that the memory of their first encounter is a happy one, something the younger woman has held dear through the years.

“There’s a picture?” Hope asks, trying not to seem too eager as Kelley nods. But she is. She’s curious to see their younger selves, this chance meeting from all those years ago.

“There’s a box of college stuff in my dad’s basement,” the younger woman says, and her voice is quiet, like it’s far away with her thoughts, sifting through old memories and trying to think of where she last saw it, “I’ll dig through it the next time I’m over there. If not, maybe Mags still has a copy.”

“Good,” Hope answers, and picks up where she left off, kissing along the long line of Kelley’s neck, the stretch of tendons and muscles under her soft, soft skin. “I’d like to see it,” she tells the other woman as her mouth drifts lower, nose nudging the strong line of her collarbone there.

Kelley’s hands come up to tangle in the short hairs under the older woman’s ponytail until, in a moment of frustration, she guides the thin elastic holder down and combs through Hope’s hair as it falls around her shoulders like a veil.

“I’m sorry I don’t remember you,” Hope whispers against her lover’s skin. The words come unbidden, have slipped past her lips before she can even try to stop them. And she wishes so badly that she could have stopped them.

Not because they’re not true. They are. She is sorry she doesn’t remember meeting Kelley all those years ago. But even so, the words reveal things she isn’t ready for Kelley to know, isn’t ready to know herself.

The things this woman makes her feel, the things Kelley makes her want and desire and dream about … she knows they exist, that these things are inside of her, growing larger, more needy, more pressing every day.

But she’s not ready to admit them to herself, not ready to acknowledge what they mean for her, for them, for their lives.

“It’s okay,” Kelley answers her, scooting closer until their bodies press together, only their clothes between them, “I was just one fan among hundreds that day alone. I didn’t mean anything to you. But,” she continues, “you should know that it meant a lot to me then, it still does. You told me something that day, you took a moment to give me a bit of advice. And I took it to heart.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hope asks, tilting her head back just the slightest, just enough to see the emotion in Kelley’s warm brown eyes, “what was that?”

The brunette laces their fingers together, looking deep into Hope’s blue eyes

“I’d just graduated from college,” she starts, “and I had some decisions to make. I was on crutches, recovering from an ankle injury I’d gotten earlier that year during a soccer match--yes,” she says with a smile, “I played soccer, I was a forward, broke my ankle after a bad tackle from a UCLA defender.”

Kelley watches as Hope rolls her eyes; she really had done a good job of pretending to know nothing about the game.

“Of course you played,” Hope mutters with a sigh, but the other woman ignores her and continues.

“I was trying to decide whether to go on and play in Europe, or give up soccer for good. And just that weekend my folks had told me about my mom’s breast cancer. So it was a pretty shitty time. Mags managed to charm her boss at the local radio station out of some complimentary tickets USSF had sent over, and took me to cheer me up.”

Hope’s eyes are soft and gentle, and she squeezes Kelley’s hand, a silent reminder that--whatever they are to each other--she’s here for her.

“And I gave you advice about all that?” she asks.

“I told you I was trying to decide whether to go overseas and play--some European teams were interested in me--or to stay here, you know, and be closer to my mom if she got worse. And you said that sometimes life gives us difficult choices, but that soccer was the kind of sport that you had to give your whole heart to. That if you couldn’t do that, you should do something else”

And it sounds like something Hope would have said.

It sounds like something someone once said to her, some advice her dad would have given her, or her grandma, if she’d come to them with a similar dilemma.

“Smart,” she tells Kelley, whose grin is amused but kind, “so what did you choose?”

Hope knows the answer, of course, it’s obvious. But she wants to hear Kelley say it, wants to hear the words in that sweet voice.

The younger woman tilts her head, narrows her eyes. Like she’s not entirely certain Hope’s question wasn’t sarcastic.

“I chose to come home,” Kelley answers, “to spend time with my mom before she passed away. And then right after she did, your brother bought this place and was looking for someone to manage the horses, so when he hired me, I stayed. And I don’t regret it,” she says, anticipating Hope’s next question, “not at all.”

Kelley looks down at her from where she sits in Hope’s lap, and she’s beautiful. The light filters in through the long waves of her hair, illuminating her from behind, and she looks young, so young. Young and full of life, happy. The things that Hope can’t ever remember being, feeling.

And yet, she knows. Knows that Kelley’s life has not been all good and light and free. Knows that Kelley has her own demons, her own shadows.

More, she knows that in some impossible way, the younger woman eases her own, the things that have haunted Hope her entire life. The fear of being unworthy, the anger at everyone who’s ever abandoned her, the grief of all the things and people she’s lost in her life. Somehow Kelley makes all that pain bearable, smooths over all the cracks in Hope’s armor.

It’s coming, she realizes, that point of no return. The moment when she has to decide which dream to chase, which part of herself to sacrifice.

Which love to let go.

Because Hope knows.

Now. In this moment.

She loves Kelley. She loves everything about her, every annoying habit, every sweet gesture. From the way she never lets her coffee cool long enough in the morning, and drinks it down, swearing the whole while, to the way she drifts off on the couch in the shared living room after dinner, hair still wet from the shower she took to clean the scent of hay and feed and manure from her skin.

She loves the way the younger woman knows exactly, exactly what she needs, always, and how easily Kelley can wind her up, bring her to the brink, and then tip her over, holding her the entire time. And how eager she is, always, when the tables are turned, when it’s Hope’s turn to tease and toy and swallow Kelley’s desperate, demanding cries with her lips.

It’s terrifying.

And yet, there’s something under the fear, something good, something right.

That just scares her even more.

So she does the only thing she can, the only thing she’s ever, truly, been good at doing.

She jumps in headfirst, paying no mind to all the dangers, all the unknowns.

She just closes her eyes, and jumps.

Hope leans forward and captures Kelley’s mouth again, and the way she kisses the younger woman is targeted, deliberate and devastating. She kisses not to tease, not to arouse, but to burn. To set fire to their blood, to their hearts and souls. She kisses Kelley like it’s the last thing she will ever do, like she’s been granted one last request before dying, and she picked this, she picked Kelley.

The older woman twists under Kelley’s legs, brings her knees up and presses her heels into the soft mattress below. And then, in an instant, she flips them, and lowers herself into the welcoming cradle of Kelley’s hips.

And Kelley moans at the sensation, the feeling of Hope’s thigh against her, against her bare skin, her most sensitive places.

She’s wet--Hope can feel Kelley’s hot arousal as it soaks through the thin fabric of her yoga pants--and she shudders as the goalkeeper tenses the firm muscle of her leg, as she rocks gently into Kelley’s body.

“Fuck, Hope,” the younger woman says in a voice that is somehow hard and soft all at once. Firm with want, gentle with affection. “I would have pulled out the jersey sooner if I’d known you’d like it so much.”

Hope looks down at her, holding herself up above the other woman with strong, toned arms. Kelley’s hair is spread over the pillow, a honey-brown halo for her head, and her hazel eyes reflect the vibrant green of the jersey that still covers her body, her breasts, her chest with its heavy rise and fall.

And there’s a want inside of her, a great, big burning need. To take, and take. To take everything Kelley can give her, everything Kelley wants to give her, and then still, to ask for more.

She wants to see the younger woman desperate beneath her, for air, for her touch, for release. She wants Kelley to forget that there’s anything outside of this room, this bed. Anything other than Hope’s hands on her, Hope’s lips and Hope’s tongue.

She wants Kelley to forget, for one single moment, that there’s anything other than this, them, their breathless surrender, submission, to each other.

“Kelley,” she whispers, and lowers her head for a kiss, smiling as she feels the younger woman’s tongue against her lips. Seeking entrance. Demanding.

But the dark-haired woman denies her lover entrance, and keeps her kisses light, sweet, instead. Measured and paced. That’s the name of the game she’s playing.

She kisses her lover leisurely, like they have all the time in the world. Kelley’s mouth, first. The tip of her nose, the tiny scar just under her eye, her temple, just over the rapid throb of her pulse. Hope smiles as Kelley mewls softly, as the woman beneath her tries to catch her lips again, tries to entice the older woman to kiss her harder, deeper.

Eventually, the goalkeeper gives in and lets Kelley kiss her back, and laughs when her partner eagerly bites at her lower lip.

Slowly, Hope shifts her weight onto a single arm, and gently teases her free hand along Kelley’s ribs until she reaches the hem of the jersey, the jersey with her name on it, her signature. She slips her fingers under the fabric and begins to draw it up, up, until the firm, defined muscles of Kelley’s abdomen are exposed.

She let the shirt fall to rest just over Kelley’s breasts, and lays her warm hand over the younger woman’s tense stomach. The brunette sucks in a breath, and Hope feels the shift of muscles, of skin, under her hand as Kelley’s lungs expand. The short contractions as she taps her fingers along the firm line that bisects her abdomen.

“You’re ticklish,” she says, and it’s not a question but an observation.

Kelley shakes her head.

“No,” she says, almost pouting.

But Hope tickles her fingers along the hard ridges of the rancher’s firm abs again, and feels the same hitch in Kelley’s breathing, the same tensing of muscles under her hand.

She just looks at the other woman, mouth curved into a sexy smirk.

“You try staying still while someone walks their hands down your stomach,” Kelley breathes, shuddering as Hope repeats the action a third time.

The goalkeeper’s smirk just grows wider.

“Oh,” she says, and licks at her lower lip, “we’ll get to that, I’m sure.” 


	12. Chapter 11

They stave off the morning as long as they can before succumbing to sleep, exhausted with pleasure. Until, just an hour or two later, just after sunrise, Kelley places a soft kiss over the words inked into Hope’s chest. 

“Shhhh,” she says, bleary-eyed but smiling broadly, when the older woman stirs, “go back to sleep. I won’t be long.”

And then she slips out of the bed that’s become theirs, pausing for a moment to watch as Hope blinks once, twice, before falling back into her dreams. It’s sweet, she thinks, the way the goalkeeper gathers up an abandoned pillow into her arms to fill the space that Kelley’s left behind.

It spurs something in the younger woman, and despite the heaviness in her limbs, the tired curve of her brow, she hurries to finish her tasks--checking on the horses, leaving instructions for today’s crew, texting Marc that she won’t be in today, that he should only text her if it’s an emergency.

And the hands laugh at her as she stumbles over her own feet in the stable-yard, as she drops the feed bucket for Darth more than once. But she just ignores them and goes about her business.

There’s a gorgeous woman asleep in her bed.

Kelley’s got somewhere to be.

\-----

Hope lingers in bed most of the morning. Even after Kelley slips back beneath the sheets with her, freshly showered and smelling of soap.

They don’t do anything more than sleep lightly, the smaller woman spooned gently in Hope’s embrace, but it’s the best morning she can remember in a long time.

Relaxing.

Comforting.

Perfect in the kinds of ways that Hope had long since given up thoughts of ever experiencing.

It isn’t until almost noon that she finally rolls and gets up, and when she sees the jersey from last night, long forgotten on the floor in the corner, she feels her face get warm and her belly roll with the memory of slowly, slowly peeling it off of Kelley’s body.

Honestly, Hope’s not certain she’ll ever be able to put one on again without remembering how it looked on the other woman, how it felt under her hands, the heat of Kelley’s skin just underneath it.

 _You’re screwed_ , the voice at the back of her head informs her, and Hope strangles a laugh.

“Ain’t that the truth,” she whispers to herself quietly. And she knows the voice is entirely clear on her meaning.

\-----

Marcus laughs for five minutes straight the next day when Hope walks in his office just after noon.

“So,” he says once he’s able to speak, “finally come up for air?”

She glares at him, but he’s never been cowed by his little sister.

“You might want to tell Kelley to keep it below the collar though,” he tells her, pointing to a bruise she’s done a terrible job of hiding.

Hope just stares at him for a few seconds longer before sighing and dropping into one of the chairs in the corner of the room.

“How long have you known,” she asks with a heavy sigh, easily catching the bottle of water he threw toward her.

“Well, you were kind of all over her after dinner the other night,” he teases, pleased to see her cheeks color and the way her eyes dart to the side in embarrassment. But he doesn’t have it in him to push too much further.

“No, I’m kidding, you weren’t exactly subtle, but it was all PG.”

“So,” she prompts after rolling her eyes as high as they would go, “seriously, Marc, how did you know?”

Hope watches as her brother sits up straight, a serious look on his face.

“Have you seen looked at yourself lately, Hope? Really looked?” he asks. But his sister just looks back at him, unsure where this is going.

“You’ve been miserable for a long time now, baby sis. You put on that big, fake smile for the press and for your team and your fans, but I know you. I know you, Hope. You haven’t been happy and maybe you’ve been able to hide it from everyone else. But you can’t hide it from me.”

Her jaw is clenched, tight with tension, and he can see the muscles working under her cheek as she struggles to say something. Or not say something. And Marcus smiles. A younger Hope wouldn’t have been able to hold it back, hold anything back.

She’s grown so much, his baby sister. And as worried as he’s been about her, right now?

Right now what he feels is pride.

“I haven’t--” Hope starts, shaking her head.

“Hope,” Marc interrupts carefully, “it’s okay. But you should know, since you got here? Every day you’ve looked a little better, a little happier. And even though it started before you and Kelley really got to know each other--and that’s not a euphemism,” he adds, “so get your mind out of the gutter.”

Hope smiles at him, and it’s just like when they were kids. When Hope was upset about their parents fighting, or about not fitting in at school, or any of her old demons, he’d sit by her side on the steps of their front porch and try to get her to smile. Just a little one. Just enough that he knew she’d be okay.

Like now.

He knows that she’ll be okay.

“I mean it, Hope. Being here, and whatever you’ve got going with Kelley, it’s been good for you. Because for the first time in a long time, you’re not faking at being okay. You’re not pretending to be happy. You actually are.”

And the thing is, she knows he’s right.

Yesterday, after she slid her arm out from under Kelley’s body and padded down the hall to the bathroom, she’d caught sight of herself in the mirror. And she almost didn’t recognize herself.

It wasn’t her hair--sex-mussed and sleep-tousled.

It wasn’t her skin--the healthy blush of her cheeks and the slight little bruises that tracked up and down her neck.

Maybe it was her eyes, bright and clear.

Maybe it was her lips; kiss-swollen, yes, but curved into something she almost didn’t remember anymore.

A smile.

A real one.

Soft and sweet and true.

“She makes me feel--,” Hope starts to say, and then stops, bites at her lower lip.

But Marc looks at her with a smile that’s almost paternal, and his sister has a flash of what kind of man--what kind of father--he’ll be when his sons, when his daughter, come to him with hearts they’re not sure how to handle, loves they’re not sure how to chase, how to keep.

“It’s okay, you know. Kelley’s pretty great,” he tells her, not entirely sure what’s holding her back; the fear of falling, perhaps, or maybe the fact that Kelley’s the first woman she’s ever felt this strongly about. Not the first she’s been involved with, but the first that’s been more than a night, more than a distraction.

When she looks up at him from across the desk, her eyes are soft and introspective.

“I think, I think I might be falling in love with her,” Hope says, like she almost can’t believe it herself.

But this comes as little surprise to Marc.

Not that he’s been spying, no. But he’s watched them together in the stables, at his home. He’s seen the way Hope is so casually gentle with Kelley. In a way he’s never seen her be with anyone else. Not even with him, not even with his kids.

With Hope, there’s always one more wall to scale, one more fence to climb over. She loves him, Marc knows, she loves her nephews and her niece. Loves Amanda in her own way. But she’s never given her whole self to anyone, not for years. Not since she lost that easy innocence of childhood, the very same he’s tried so hard to preserve for his own kids as long as he can.

It’s different with Kelley.

It’s been different from the start. He saw it that first night.

The spark between them.

And in the weeks, the months?

It’s only grown stronger.

Hope is just Hope with the stable-master. Just a woman.

No wonder she looks so at ease lately, no wonder she looks so light.

But still, he knows he has to tread carefully. Because he loves his sister. And he cares deeply for Kelley, too. Watches out for her just as if she were his kid sister too.

So as much as he thinks that they might be the best thing for each other, he knows he can’t push her, can’t meddle.

All he can do is support her--support both of them.

And hope to whatever powers are in control that it works out.

Because he has a really good feeling about this.

“Hope,” Marc says, coming around to lean against the desk in front of his sister. And closer, he can see the tiny wicks of fear in her eyes, drawing up her old insecurities from the dark well deep, deep inside. “I can tell that you care a lot about her. And if you’re falling in love with her, that’s a good thing. You are so worthy of love, kiddo. I know your head tells you differently sometimes, but trust me, I know. You are so, so worthy.”

He puts his hands on her shoulders and looks straight into her eyes. And suddenly she’s not grown anymore, not his adult sister, but the kid who used to follow him around, hero worship plain in her eyes. Suddenly she’s the toddler who gave him sloppy kisses every night before bed, the baby he only barely remembers.

“You’ve spent your whole life letting your head lead, Hope. Maybe it’s time to have a little faith in your heart.”

She hears him, Marc knows. He can see the words sink into her, settle into her skin, soak into her blood.

“Now,” he tells her, leaning back again, “I happen to know that someone’s birthday is just around the corner. The date is a closely guarded secret, of course, but for the right price, I could be convinced to talk.”

 _It’s not meddling_ , he tells himself.

It’s just … _assisting_.

And if he gets some free babysitting out of his baby sister?

Well, his mama didn’t raise no fool.


	13. Chapter 12

Kelley’s birthday begins with a gentle rain. Warm and light and pleasant, the gentle patter against the window wakes Hope early. **  
**

But that’s okay.

It gives her plenty of time to enjoy the feeling of the younger woman in bed beside her. Just the simple comfort of being together, of laying next to Kelley and watching the faces she makes while she sleeps.

Until Kelley begins to move, restlessly, starting to wake, and Hope smiles.

It’s time to begin the birthday celebration.

\-----

“No, seriously, who told you,” Kelley asks as she picks a towel up off the bed and starts massaging at her wet hair. “Was it Marc? Or Diego? Is loyalty dead? Traitors.”

And she sounds grumpy, but Hope can see the shy smile Kelley tries to hide, the genuine pleasure that rounds out the shorter woman’s voice. She’d certainly enjoyed her wake-up, Hope knows.

The older woman grins.

“I’ll never reveal the name of my source,” she says, “but coincidentally we’re babysitting for Marc and Amanda this weekend. And by ‘we,’ I mean you. Because now that you’re finally a grown-up--”

And Kelley laughs loudly at that, coming over to press a kiss gently at the corner of Hope’s mouth.

“Alright, loose lips,” she smirks, “so it’s my birthday. Where’s my present?”

“Hurry up and get dressed,” Hope responds, “and I’ll show you.”

\-----

They drive out to Andy’s school, and Hope parks out by the field that doubles as the team’s football stadium and it’s soccer pitch.

“Here, champ,” Hope says with a smile, and reaches into the back seat for a drawstring bag, “go get changed. Let’s see what kind of skills you’ve got.” The look in her eyes is practically fiendish, and Kelley feels her blood quicken in a mix of excitement and arousal.

She tamps down the latter as she opens the bag and sees what’s inside … a US jersey, her name blocked out in white on the back and shorts to match, a pair of cleats.

“We’re playing soccer?” Kelley asks, tracing her fingers over the letters of her last name.

“Once you get your butt into that bathroom and get changed,” the older woman teases, opening the door to get out of the truck. “Figured we’d warm up a bit and then, if you’re up for it, Andy’s coach said he’d be happy to let us join the team for practice today, maybe do a little five on five or split into teams and play a mock match.”

But Kelley’s already out of the car by the time Hope finishes explaining, sticking out her tongue at the implied insult to her athletic ability.

“If?” she calls back pointedly as she marches toward the cinder-block building with the locker rooms and public bathrooms. “We’ll see just who’s not up for it, old lady.”

And Hope just shakes her head as she watches Kelley storm off, pulling off the shirt and jeans she’d put on over her practice gear.

“Old lady, my ass,” she mutters to herself, “I’m a professional athlete. I’ve been to the Olympics. Several times.”

\-----

Hope can’t deny it, Kelley’s good.

Damned good.

After some warm-up drills and some wild shots from the PK marker, the former forward--Stanford’s highest all-time goal-scorer, she informs the goalkeeper--Kelley shakes off the last of her rusty edges, and every shot becomes just a little more precise, just a little more force and direction behind it.

The easy blocks are becoming harder and harder as Kelley gets back into her groove, feeling more and more at home in her boots, on the field.

She’s missed this, she realizes right around the time Hope has to make a leaping dive to keep the ball out of the net. She’s really missed this. The competitiveness of it; sure, she’s practiced with Andy, helping him on his footwork or setting up in makeshift goal for him to practice penalties.

But this?

Playing? The drive to compete, to score, to win?

She had no idea how much a part of her life it had been, not even when it was gone.

It wasn’t until today. Until Hope brought her here and got her on the field that Kelley truly realizes just how large the empty space she used to fill with the game, with the ball and the field and her team, has become inside of her.

Hope thinks she gave Kelley the gift of playing against an Olympic champion, a World Cup winner.

Kelley knows the truth.

The gift is so, so much more.

\-----

After a long a vicious match, Hope’s team of teenage boys and girls manages to hold off Kelley’s team. But it’s close--just a single goal, the only goal of the match, in fact, stands between them when the coach blows the whistle to end their practice match.

“Good game,” Hope whispers to Kelley as they pass each other on the line after, everyone shaking hands just like an actual game.

“And you,” she adds, pointing to her nephew, “you almost had me on that near-post corner--good job!”

They stay for a little while, Hope signing autographs and talking to the kids while Kelley watches--sweaty, but content. Until she sees the taller woman begin to shift nervously, back and forth, from foot to foot. Until she sees Hope’s free hand--clenching and unclenching--behind her back as she answers a few questions from the young players.

“Hey, is Aunt Hope okay,” Andy asks as she moves up from the back of the little group.

“She’s not a big fan of crowds,” Kelley answers, and gives him a pat on the shoulder, “but don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

Because Kelley knows, of course, a little. She knows enough.

Enough to recognize when Hope’s manner goes from fidgety to anxious.

“Hey,” Hope says, only the slightest waver in her voice, “I really want to thank you guys for letting us practice with you today. We’ll have to do it again soon.” And she smiles over to them as the coach nods and thanks her.

On the way back to the car, Kelley takes the keys, letting Hope sit and relax in the passenger seat for a few moments before she pulls out of the parking lot.

“That was,” she tries to say once she sees the tension begin to fade from the older woman’s limbs, “Hope, that was a really great birthday present.”

Kelley reaches over to pull Hope’s hand up, kisses the strong palm.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

But Hope, eyes easy now, no longer darting back and forth, no longer searching for an exit, an escape route, just gives her a small but beautiful smile.

“Oh, O’Hara, that wasn’t your birthday present. Take us home so we can change and then we’ll do presents.”

And intrigued, Kelley does just that.

\-----

“You’re not going to twirl me around in a bunch of circles and leave me here to find my way back, are you?” Kelley asks, not entirely kidding, and Hope chuckles, a surprisingly deep sound from the soft-voiced goalkeeper.

All she knows is that they drove for a little bit after Hope secured the blindfold over her eyes and helped her into the passenger seat of the truck.

Now, now they’re walking, Kelley clutching at Hope’s arm as she carefully, carefully, takes each step on the uneven ground.

“No, seriously. Are you going to push me off a cliff or something? I’m still so young, I haven’t even finished the whole _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy yet, Hope!”

“Calm down, drama queen,” Hope whispers as they come to a stop, “we’re here.”

Kelley stands for a moment, just taking everything in.

She can hear water, a gentle dribbling sound somewhere nearby, and the buzz of insects, birds calling for each other in the trees.

“We’re at the tree?” she says, “But why the blindfold?”

And when Hope lifts the cloth from Kelley’s eyes, she understands.

“Hope,” the younger woman murmurs, inching closer, “this is beautiful.”

Someone has decorated the tree--their tree. They’ve hung ribbons--streamers in every color--from the branches.

Underneath, there’s a comfortable-looking bench swing hanging from a sturdy branch, a couple of pillows placed neatly upon the seat, and on the ground nearby?

A large blanket spread out over the grasses, and a picnic basket there waiting for them.

Hope’s getaway place has been transformed.

“You did this?” Kelley asks, her voice soft and quiet with wonder.

Because she knows just how important this little bit of peace and quiet is to Hope, and she’s honored that Hope even invited her here that first time, and every time after.

“I thought maybe we could use something a little better than old fold-up picnic chairs,” the older woman answers with a nervous smile. “And I had help with the decorations and the food. The guys did this while we were at the field this morning, and Mandy put the basket together. So I didn’t really do anything at all.”

But Kelley doesn’t let her shrug off the credit. She leans into the other woman and whispers in her ear: “It’s perfect, I love it.”

“Now, come on,” she says, pulling Hope toward the blanket, “let’s see what Mandy packed. I’m starving.”

\-----

Later, after the food and the champagne are gone, after Hope unbuttoned Kelley’s shirt and kissed her way down the birthday girl’s strong, flat stomach, after she unbuckled Kelley’s wide leather belt and tugged her jeans down to the younger woman’s knees, they relax.

Kelley tucks herself into Hope’s side, resting her head just over the goalkeeper’s breast, and she can hear how rapid, how powerful the heart is underneath. It soothes her, the quick but steady rhythm, and exhausted by the skilled way Hope has just played her body, Kelley quickly drifts off into a light sleep.

Hope, though, Hope doesn’t sleep. Instead, she uses the arm that’s not around Kelley to support her head as she lays there on the blanket.

She’s nervous, still. Because the soccer this morning, the bench and the picnic?

They’re not Kelley’s birthday gifts.

That’s still tucked away safely in the backpack she’s brought along, the backpack there on the blanket just within reach.

She’s nervous because even though this gift is small enough to fit there, tucked between the pages of the book she’s been reading this week, it’s so important. It’s so big.

And she has no idea how Kelley will take it.

\-----

When Kelley wakes, she’s still snuggled up close to Hope’s side as the older woman reads.

“Best. Birthday. Ever.” Kelley whispers quietly, looking up to catch the moment when the corners of Hope’s mouth curve into a sweet smile.

“It’s not over yet,” Hope answers, putting down her book.

Slowly, they get up, shake out the cricks and cramps that come with laying on the ground for an extended period of time. And Hope makes fun of Kelley’s moan as she arches her back.

“You sound like an old woman,” she teases, flicking a piece of grass over in the other woman’s direction.

But Kelley just groans louder. “I am old,” she says, sticking her lower lip out, and it just makes Hope laugh louder, smile wider.

“You’ll never be old,” she tells Kelley, patting the open spot next to her on the swing, “you’re a five-year-old trapped in a twenty-eight-year-old’s body. You’ll be eating Lucky Charms and watching Spongebob when you’re ninety-five and senile.”

And Kelley smiles as she sits, drawing her legs up beneath her. “That’s probably true,” she tells Hope, leaning into the goalkeeper’s shoulder.

“So,” Hope says, playing with Kelley’s hair, “we’re supposed to be at the main house in a couple of hours for a birthday party. But I want to give you your birthday present before we go.”

Kelley looks confused. “Isn’t … isn’t this my present,” she asks, sitting up and waving her arms over at the remnants of their picnic, the swing they’re sitting on, the decorated tree. “And this morning, soccer at the high school?” she asks.

The older woman looks over to Kelley, and shakes her head shyly.

“No,” Hope answers, “this is.”

And she hands over a thin envelope with Kelley’s name written on the front in her sharp, focused hand.

“Hope,” Kelley says softly, pulling out the piece of paper inside, “Hope, what is this?”

The goalkeeper shifts, bringing her legs up and crossing them as she turns to face Kelley on the bench next to her.

“I know how important this new business plan you and Marc are working on is, how personal it is to you,” Hope tells her. “And I want to help you make it happen. I want to help you reach your dream.”

For a moment, there’s silence between them, Kelley looking deep into Hope’s eyes, and for a second Hope wonders what she sees there. Who she sees there.

“Hope, this is ...,” Kelley tries to say, but her voice trembles, and her hand shakes as she reaches out to touch the other woman, to ground herself as she struggles to find the words she’s looking for.

“Don’t say no,” Hope whispers in a quiet voice, “please. I know how important your mother was to you--is to you. And how much you want to create this place in her memory, how you want to help people in her memory.”

“And Kelley,” the older woman continues, “you’re important to me. You’re so important. I was in a bad place when I came here, and somehow you helped me to feel safe, to feel like I could eventually be okay again. I want to help you help others heal too.”

There are other words to say.

But not now. Not today.

Today is for Kelley.

“I don’t know what to say,” Kelley says, almost a whisper, and looks back down at the check in her hands, “it’s a lot of money, Hope.”

She sounds unsure, but Hope doesn’t let that discourage her.

“Say yes,” she tells Kelley, “please?” And she lowers her head to rest her forehead against Kelley’s crown.

But Kelley shakes her head.

“I can’t,” she answers, and looks up at Hope with a thoughtful expression. “I can’t because then this won’t mean anything.”

Hope tilts her head in confusion, uncertain what the other woman means. But Kelley answers the question Hope can’t bring herself to ask, closing the distance between them.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” Kelley tells Hope, “but I’m falling in love with you.”

And Hope is struck silent, still trying to wrap her heart around Kelley’s words.

“I know it’s not what we meant when this started. And I know you might not feel the same way, but ... ” Kelley starts to ramble, a little nervous at the heart-struck expression on Hope’s face, the way she’s sitting right in front of her, mouth open like she doesn’t know what to say.

But that would be wrong. Because Hope knows exactly what to say.

“Kelley,” Hope says, leaning in even closer, until only the space of a single breath stands between them, “I’m kind of in love with you too.”

And the kiss that follows isn’t perfect. It’s messy and uncoordinated and so beautifully them--Kelley laughing and Hope tenderly brushing away strands of hair from sticking to those damp, freckled cheeks.

“Kind of,” Kelley asks when they break apart, and Hope just rolls her eyes.

“I could maybe be talked into ‘completely’ if you accept my birthday gift,” the older woman teases.

“Tell you what,” Kelley counters, “instead of this check--which is quite possibly the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me, just so you know--you know what I’d like for my birthday?”

Hope nuzzles her nose against the firm curve of Kelley’s jaw. “Yeah,” she asks, “and what’s that?”

“Be my partner instead,” Kelley whispers.

\-----

The party at Marc and Amanda’s is loud to the point of raucous, family and friends roaming around the large green expanse of the yard, cold beer and fresh-grilled burgers in their hands. There’s a large cake on the buffet table, and countless other desserts surrounding it--cookies and brownies and bars that people have brought to pass, and balloons floating in the gentle evening breeze. 

Kelley moves in and out of the groups of people, chatting with one of her stable-hands there, laughing with Mandy over there, stopping by to drop a kiss on Hope’s cheek as she moves toward a group of wives gathered near the food. But Hope, for the most part, stays in one place.

Watching Kelley with soft eyes.

Taking everything in with a heart that feels so light she’s surprised she isn’t floating up there with the balloons, with what she knows must be a great big goofy smile on her face.

“Hey, there, Hopey,” Marc says, coming to stand next to his sister, “good day?” 

And she nods.

He’d known her plans, of course; he’d been one of the guys she’d pressed into service to get the tree ready, to install the swing.

“Everything go according to plan,” he asks. Because he knows about the gift as well, the check that should help Kelley get started on making her dream a reality. 

And at that, Hope turns to him, that smile still stretching widely across her face.

“Not at all,” she tells him and laughs, “not at all. She said no--”

Her brother looks like he’s getting ready to comfort her, to pull her into a hug and hold her tight.

“--but,” the goalkeeper continues, “she told me she loved me.”

Marcus pulls his sister into a hug.

“I’m so happy for you, Hope,” he whispers into her ear before pulling back to look at her carefully, to take the whole of her in. “And you, you’re happy?” he asks, but he already knows the answer.

He can see it radiating off of her.

“And then,” Hope continues, “she asked if I’d be her partner instead, the three of us. Said she wouldn’t take the money herself, but if I was interested in she was pretty sure she could get her other partner to agree to letting me in.”

“Oh, my God,” Marcus laughs, “that’s perfect.”

She just nods. It absolutely is.


	14. Chapter 13

Before they know it, it’s almost time to leave.

Almost time for Hope to pack her bags and meet up with the National Team for as they start to prepare for their qualifying tournament.

And the anticipation, the expectations--it affects Hope. Maybe in ways she’s not even aware. _Maybe_ , Kelley thinks to herself as Hope starts to get up earlier and earlier, as she slips out of bed long before the sun even rises, _maybe she is._

Because the moment her travel plans were made, something changed between them.

Now there’s a gulf, a chasm filled with things that Hope isn’t saying, things Hope isn’t talking about.

Now Hope runs goes on long, punishing runs on her own, without waiting for Kelley to wake, to stumble down the stairs and join her.

Now she doesn’t walk along with Kelley on the short path to the stables, or spend her mornings working with Darth and Calamity, or hanging around the other stable-hands.

And their afternoons aren’t spent by the river, she doesn’t go fishing in the quiet water or sit on Kelley’s swing and read as the sun slowly moves lower and lower in the sky.

Honestly, Kelley’s not certain what Hope’s been doing lately when she’s not at the house, when they’re not eating dinner on the couch and watching nerdy quasi-educational or reality television shows on television-- _Mythbusters_ or _Masterchef_ or documentaries on the Vikings in Europe or the discovery of a new possible humanoid species in the caves of an Asian jungle.

Even when she sleeps, it’s different. There’s something desperate about the way Hope sleeps, lately, the way she tosses and turns in the middle of the night. More than once, Kelley’s woke to hear Hope whispering words in her sleep, too quiet to hear what she’s saying, but the tone is clear.

Worry.

Fear.

And there’s nothing Kelley can do. Nothing but gently shake the other woman awake, stroke Hope’s long, silky hair until she drifts off back to sleep. Press soothing kisses to her shoulder, her cheek, her lips, whisper all the things she loves about the older woman until Hope’s eyes droop again, until her breathing slows and steadies once again.

“It’s just nerves,” Hope says when Kelley brings it up. “We’ve got to have a good showing at the qualifiers this year, maintain our reputation as the best in the world.”

But it’s not that.

And Kelley knows it.

\-----

“She’s always been like this,” Marc says, “she won’t ask for help or tell anyone what’s going on in her head.”

Kelley didn’t mean to talk about Hope with her brother--it feels like a little like she’s betraying the older woman’s secrets--but he started it.

Kind of.

He’d asked her how she was doing.

She wasn’t going to lie to him or anything.

So the guilt doesn’t consume her as much as it could.

“I just wish I could help,” she tells him, “she’s hurting again, and I don’t know how to make it better.”

“Are you kidding?” Marc asks, his voice incredulous, and he starts to laugh.

Kelley looks at him indignantly, eyes narrowed and fierce, like she can’t understand what could be funny about this.

“Kelley, you can’t tell? You are helping. Listen,” he tells her, leaning in close, “before London? Hope didn’t talk to anyone for months. We’d get a text every now and again, but other than that, nothing. Maybe she’s a little more focused right at the moment, and yeah, the some of her demons are back, but right now--as we speak, in fact--she’s at my place babysitting Ro and Tommy so Amanda can get some shopping done.”

There’s a commotion outside for a moment, trainers passing in the aisle outside Kelley’s office, and they pause for a second until it’s silent again.

“And you know what she did this morning? She had a Skype session with her therapist. And tonight, she told me, she’s taking you out to dinner. Because she knows she’s got you worried and she feels bad about it. The old Hope? Even if she noticed, she wouldn’t have done anything about it. Because her life was one thing and one thing only--the next game, the next tournament.”

Marc sits back and crosses his legs. “Now, though, there are things that are just as important--and Kelley,” he tells the younger woman, “you’re the most important one of all. You steady her. You ground her. You help her simply by being you, kid. Simply by loving her. Keep doing that and everything will be just fine.”

Maybe it’s the eyes--Hope’s eyes--or the little moments when something in his body language, some tic or habit or quirk, reminds her of the woman she loves, but when Marc tells her that everything will be okay, she believes him.

She has faith.

\-----

“Hey,” Hope says from the porch swing as Kelley comes up the steps.

She looks calmer than she has in days.

And Kelley comes to sit next to the goalkeeper, who lifts an arm to make room for her to nestle in close.

“Hey,” the younger woman answers, and rubs her nose against the soft cotton of Hope’s shirt.

Already some of the worry has eased.

Already the gulf seems smaller.

They sit for a few minutes, swinging back and forth in the quiet of the late afternoon.

“I’m sorry,” Hope whispers into Kelley’s hair.

Kelley doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask for more, for an explanation. She just squeezes Hope’s knee gently, her forgiveness silent, but sincere.

“I hear we’re going out for dinner tonight,” the younger woman says after a while, and the other woman laughs quietly.

“Marc’s got a big mouth,” she responds, a smile on her lips.

“It’s not entirely his fault,” Kelley tells the woman sitting next to her, “I was worrying.”

Feeling Hope tense, Kelley pulls away just enough that she can look up at her.

“No, don’t apologize again,” she says, and Hope looks a little impressed at the vigor in her voice. “I mean it,” Kelley continues, “don’t. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

There’s a hint of something around the corners of Hope’s eyes when she answers.

“There is,” she tells Kelley, “but I’m hungry. I’m giving you twenty minutes to get ready or I’m heading out without you.”

She smiles, but Kelley looks up at her, serious, and maybe a little concerned.

“Hope,” Kelley starts to say, but the older woman cuts her off.

“It’s okay, Kel,” Hope tells her, “I’ll explain at dinner.”

And despite the look she can’t quite decipher, Kelley nods. She can wait.

“Now,” Hope says with an amused grin, “go get ready. The clock is starting.”

\-----

“The Rainbow Room,” Kelley exclaims, her laughter filling the small cab of the truck. “Hope Solo, are you taking me to a gay bar for dinner?”

“Yeah,” Hope answers, chuckling as she unbuckles her seatbelt, “this crazy chick I know told me that they do the best BLT in town.”

“Crazy?” Kelley asks facetiously, “She sounds like a pretty smart dame.”

“Well, she’s something of a savant,” the taller woman teases, and links their arms as they make their way to the entrance, Kelley’s laughter echoing into the night.

Hope waits until their burgers sit steaming in front of them before she speaks.

“I know I’ve been distant,” she starts, “and I shouldn’t have been, I shouldn’t. It’s just that I’ve been alone for a long time, Kelley, and I forgot how to not be on my own. I’ve been blocking you out because I thought I had to, because I thought I had to, I thought that I couldn’t be strong anymore if I kept you with me, kept you inside me.”

And it’s not like Kelley doesn’t understand, doesn’t know what Hope means.

She does.

She fell in love with a woman built of walls. She scaled them and battered them and dug under them. Some of them, she tore right down.

She understands how Hope might feel the need for them again, heading back into the world that laid their foundations, that added brick after brick after brick.

But she’d be lying if she said there wasn’t a prick of hurt in Hope’s words.

Still, she understands.

Hope shakes her head as Kelley opens her mouth to speak.

“Wait, please?” she asks, and the younger woman nods. She can wait.

“Have you heard the story about my shoulder,” Hope asks, “about how I played and played even when I knew I shouldn’t?”

Kelley remembers the injury, the concern in the soccer world about whether Solo’d be healthy in time for the World Cup in Germany.

“I knew,” Hope repeats, “I knew I needed help. But I couldn’t ask anyone. I was too afraid. I thought that if I told the trainers about it, or the doctors, they’d pull me. That they’d replace me and there’d go my chance.”

The older woman takes a sip of water from her class, thinking about how to say what she needs to get off her chest.

“I convinced myself that I couldn’t show any weakness, that I had to be strong--all the time. So I shook off the pain during practice and in games, and I saved my tears for the shower, waited until everyone was gone so no one would see.”

Hope looks up and meets Kelley’s eyes. There’s so much kindness there, so much gentleness and love.

“I was so scared, Kelley. I was terrified and I was in pain and I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone about it.”

And Kelley can’t be quiet anymore, can’t keep silent any longer.

“Hope,” she whispers, reaching across the booth to lay her hands over the other woman’s, “honey, you are the strongest person I know. You are.”

The goalkeeper brings one of the younger woman’s hands up to her lips, lays a soft kiss to Kelley’s palm.

“I’m learning,” she says quietly. “I’m learning how to be. And apparently that means not doing everything on your own. I let my anxiety--about leaving, about playing and making the Olympics, even about being surrounded by so many people--I let it all get in the way. Into my head. And I shouldn’t have. I forgot that I didn’t want to be that person anymore, that I wasn’t that person anymore.”

Kelley doesn’t say anything, just mimics Hope’s kiss to her palm from just a few moments ago. Except she kisses right over the lines on Hope’s wrist, the tattoo there.

“You know,” she whispers against the delicate skin there, just loud enough for the dark-haired woman to hear, “your name wasn’t meant to be a challenge. You don’t have to do everything alone. And I hope--I hope you know that I’m here. For whatever you need, I’m here.”

She rubs gentle circles over the ink, and looks up into Hope’s blue, blue eyes.

“I love you, I’m here for you, okay?” Kelley tells the woman across the table, and her lips curve into the hint of a sweet smile.

“I know,” Hope answers, and, “and my therapist said pretty much the same thing this morning, not as eloquently as you with the tattoo, but the meaning was the same.”

And Kelley laughs.   
  
“Good,” she says, “she sounds like a smart lady.”

Hope just shakes her head.

\-----

The day before Hope leaves, Kelley arranges to be away from work.

If this is going to be her last day with Hope for a month, at least, she wants to take advantage of it as best she can.

And she does.

They wake up late, the sun already high in the sky by the time Hope shifts and stretches and arches her back into Kelley’s warm body behind her.

“Morning, sleepyhead” the younger woman whispers into Hope’s dark hair. It’s not often that she ends up holding Hope through the night, but when it happens, she cherishes the feeling.

Hope blinks and struggles to catch the time on the alarm clock next to the bed.

“We overslept,” she says, a little surprised, “you should have been at work hours ago.”

But Kelley splays her hand over Hope’s belly, underneath the worn t-shirt the older woman’d slipped on before bed the night before.

“Nope,” she tells the woman in her arms, “not today. We’re playing hooky. There are some things I want to do before you leave.”

And Hope sighs, like the thought is too burdensome to even contemplate. “Well,” she says, rolling to lay on her back, to be able to look up into Kelley’s eyes, “if you must. Just don’t leave too many hickeys--Pinoe would never let me live them down.”

Kelley laughs, smiling down at the woman beneath her.

“Not that kind of hooky,” she says dryly, and laughs as Hope’s grin fades.

She slowly rises, climbs out of the bed, holding a hand out to the goalkeeper as she does.

“Oh, fine,” Kelley tells Hope with a familiar wanting grin, “maybe we can fit it in. But we’ll have to multitask …”

\-----

They end up by the tree.

There’s never been any other place for them. No other place that means as much.

Kelley packs some food for them, the large picnic blanket, and after she parks the truck, they walk the short distance through the field hand in hand.

And when they get there, Hope looks at her in awe. Because while the ribbons are long gone, no longer hanging off the branches of the tree, now there’s a wooden chest--built to match the swing--just next to it.

“Like you’re the only one who can work up a surprise,” Kelley teases, squeezing Hope’s hand in her own, and pulling the taller woman with her as she moves to their usual spot.

“I figured we’d get tired of carting things out here,” she explains, and opens the lid. The pillows from before are there, and she pulls them out, tossing them to rest on the bench of the swing.

Underneath is Hope’s fishing pole in its case, and the small tackle box that’s spent the past few months taking up space in the truck.

“So this is why Marc called me over to emergency babysit the kids while Mandy ran some errands,” Hope asks with a raised eyebrow. “Nicely done.”

Kelley just laughs.

\-----

In the morning, when she’s on the plane that will take her to meet up with the rest of the team, Hope thinks back on the previous day, those hours spent by the side of the small river, those hours spent loving Kelley under the warm afternoon sun.

Kelley’d fallen asleep as they lay on the blanket, but Hope--Hope couldn’t sleep. Instead, she’d lain there, feeling Kelley’s hot, heavy breaths against her chest, and tried to remember if she’d ever felt so beautifully whole in her life before.

She knows--she knew then--that she has not.

She has not.

Until now.

Until Kelley and the beautiful, perfect gift of Kelley’s love for her.

And it’s this realization, this epiphany, that emboldens her, that gives her a kind of strength she’d never known could exist.

It’s this thought, this feeling, this truth, that has her pull Kelley close at the departure gate, even as Marc and Mandy and her nephews and niece stand and watch. It’s this that has her kiss the younger woman, deeply, deeply, with her whole heart.

In front of her family, in front of the friends and the local press who have gathered to see her off. In front of a crowd of people she’s never met.

It’s this, this knowing, that leaves her with no regrets as she walks down the long hallway toward her flight, head held high and heart full.

Finally.

Finally. 

She knows.


	15. Chapter 14

As Hope sits before the crowd of reporters in front of the raised stage, she feels her breath catch, her heart skip a beat.

But then she thinks of the river, of a quiet afternoon with the birds singing and the insects buzzing about their little lives. She thinks of a soft red-checked blanket, and the way the grass tickled at her feet when she rose to chase after a napkin caught in the slight wind. But mostly, she thinks of the warmth beside her under the low afternoon sun, the times they’d fallen asleep together in the shade of a tall, old pine tree, and how she’d wake up to find Kelley tucked into her shoulder, arm around her waist.

How they fit together so well, like they’d been sleeping and waking and loving for years now.

And she realizes--she’s okay. She’s going to be just fine.

No matter what happens, no matter what she decides or which path she chooses to walk, she’ll be just fine.

It makes the decision easy.

The easiest thing she’s ever done.

A cough from the back of the room brings her back, and she smiles down at the room, the people waiting to hear her speak.

“I’m sorry,” she tells them, and for the first time in forever, it’s her voice, her words coming out of her mouth, “it’s been awhile since I’ve done this.”

The chuckle that ripples through the room is gentle, amused.

“I want to start by saying thank you for all your support,” Hope continues, “you and the fans back home have been amazing. You inspire us to keep going, and I know that I speak for the whole team when I say that your faith in us gives us strength. We couldn’t do it without you, without our fans.”

She hears the rapid click of shutters as the photographers kneeling in front of her snap their pictures, and wills herself to relax, to breathe.

In the middle, someone raises a hand, and Greg, the team’s media director, steps forward to direct the traffic of questions that are coming.

But she shakes her head at him, ignoring his confused look.

“If you’ll hold your questions for a few minutes, I have a few more things to say,” she says, catching the way U.S. Soccer rep’s head falls forward onto his chest in what she assumes is resignation.

“I’m sure you’re all aware of the events earlier this year,” she says with a wry smile.

“You mean your suspension from the National Team and the Seattle Reign after an altercation with a fan?” the woman from _ESPN Magazine_ calls out.

“Actually,” Hope says, taking a deep breath, “that wasn’t a suspension. The first reporter mislabeled it and we decided not to correct him. What actually happened is that I took an extended medical leave based on the recommendations of my doctors and with the full support of both teams.”

Carli nudges her under the table, a friendly _I’m here, you’re doing great,_ and Hope looks over to her with a small smile.

“The short version of the tale is this,” Hope continues, and as she looks around the room she sees the row of teammates standing against the back wall, with their kind faces and thumbs up that several of them are holding out. “About three years ago I started receiving fan mail that gradually morphed into a stalker situation. Precautions were taken and law enforcement was contacted, but there were very few leads to help identify the suspect. Until one night when I came out to my car after a Reign game. I was one of the last to leave and it was dark. I didn’t realize that there was someone else in my car until I put it into reverse and started to pull out of my parking spot.”

Her voice trembles, just the slightest, at the memory, at being caught so vulnerable in one of the places she’d always felt the safest, and Carli gives up any pretense of holding back, and reaches out for Hope’s hand.

“Sorry,” Hope says with a self-deprecating laugh, “I don’t talk about this often. And certainly not in front of so many people.” 

The crowd of reporters looks back at her uncomfortably. This isn’t the story they know, Hope Solo angry and looking for a fight. The narrative she shares with them goes against every fact, every detail, they ever thought they knew about her.

“Thankfully, one of our late night security officers saw my headlights and came by to check on me,” she continues, “and I was lucky, too, that the man in my car had not yet become violent. He was just obsessed, and convinced that we were in a relationship together. But if the guard hadn’t come by, and if I had fought back or resisted his delusion, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have used physical force to get me to participate in his fantasy.”

There’s a soft murmuring in the crowd, and then a hand shoots up.

“Why is this the first we’re hearing of the incident,” one of the foreign newspaper reporters asks, and Hope nods in his direction.

“The man in question was examined by medical professionals and deemed not fit to stand trial. Instead, he was sent to a secure mental health facility where he remains today. The Reign and U.S. Soccer public relations departments worked hard not to let the incident get out and I fully support the judge’s decision not to take it to trial, and not only because it meant that I could get on with my life without worrying about court proceedings and press coverage. The man was ill and needed help, and now he’s getting it.”

As if on cue, she hears the shutters all go off again.

“I suppose we all tried to keep it quiet because women’s soccer didn’t need another Hope Solo scandal, even one in which I was not at fault. But covering it up didn’t keep it from affecting my life,” Hope admits, and she can feel herself blinking back the tears that have started to gather. “But the truth is that even though we kept it from affecting the team or me as a player, it began affecting me personally.”

Her legs starts to jiggle under the table, and her fingers tap out a rhythm on the table, but otherwise she’s rigid, tense, the hard line of her jaw clenched tight.

“I, um,--” she falters for a moment, “I began experiencing panic attacks. Small spaces. Big crowds. You have no idea how high my heart-rate jumped when I first came in the room earlier, higher than it ever gets in the game for sure,” she says, trying to make a joke.

Some of the reporters chuckle to help ease the tension, but most of them look back at her, like they can’t believe what they’re hearing.

“Rather than get help, and afraid of what seeking help might do to my career, or how my friends and teammates and coaches thought of me, I turned to other ways of managing my anxiety and panic attacks. I isolated myself, I drank, and I spent a lot of time angry. At myself, at the stalker, at the things that caused the fear and the anxiety and the depression to come back. It got worse and worse, to the point that some days I struggled to leave my home; others, even being in the locker room, with people I’d known for years and trusted more than anyone else felt like too much.”

As she looks around the room, Hope sees many of the reporters typing furiously, and at the back, several of her teammates look like they’re wiping away tears.

For many of them, this is only the second time they’re hearing the story. Only a few--her closest friends--had known anything before the team meeting the night before.

“And” Hope says, and struggles again to get her voice under control, steady, “if you haven’t already put the pieces together, the whole situation came to a head earlier this year. At the home-opener win against Portland, a game with record-breaking attendance. Walking back to the locker room, the barricade failed due to the volume of people wanting autographs from my teammates and I, and I was surrounded by fans and press.”

Hope takes a shaky breath before continuing.

“There’s no excuse for losing control that night, however. My struggle does not make what happened okay, and I regret deeply that I lashed out and struck a fan. All I can offer in explanation is that due to an unfortunate confluence of events, I experienced a panic attack, one of the worst I’ve ever had. I quite literally wasn’t in my right mind that night, and that’s on me. Had I confided in my teammates, my coach, my doctors, I could have been receiving help. Maybe that night would have been different, maybe not. But again, that’s on me.”

Hope exhales deeply, her whole body light after her unburdening.

“Why did you decide to tell us all this now,” someone calls out from the back, loud, but polite.

And Hope smiles--a real smile--for the first time since she started to speak.

“A very important person told me to stop thinking of my name as a challenge,” she says, and then clarifies for the sake of the confused people looking back at her. “My whole life I’ve believed I had to do everything on my own. I’ve learned recently, with the help of my family and friends, that I was wrong. That I could ask for help and trust that the people who love me will answer the call.”

“And as for why now? First,” Hope continues, “I think it’s important to talk about. Mental illness is so stigmatized in our society--people are literally dying because they feel like they can’t talk about what they’re going through. My good friend and teammate Ashlyn Harris has worked closely with organizations like _To Write Love on Her Arms_ for exactly that reason. And in sports, I think, there’s even more stigma. We’re athletes, we have big contracts, we get awards and get to travel and meet amazing people, so how could we be suffering, right?”

She takes another breath, because as much as this whole speech has been off-script, this last part? This last part is going to come out of left-field. For her team, for the reporters, for everyone.

“And secondly, I’m sharing this story now because tomorrow’s game will be my last with the Women’s National Team. I have decided to to hang up my jersey. I love soccer and I love the team--I always will--but it’s time for me to focus on the other things in my life that I love, like my family. Spending time with them these past few months has reminded me of how much I’ve missed, and I’ve realized that I don’t want to miss anything else.”

“I once gave someone a piece of advice,” Hope continues, “I told her that soccer’s not a game you can give anything less than your whole life to. And I believe that. I truly do. I’m retiring now because as much as I love this game and this team, all the friends and family I’ve made through the years, I can no longer give it my whole heart. That belongs to someone else now, and for as long as she’ll let me, I mean to show her.”

The room is practically buzzing now, cameras snapping, reporters frantically taking notes, her teammates in the back with their shocked expressions as they whisper back and forth to each other.

This isn’t how she wanted to tell them, not like this, not blindsiding them at a press conference. Hope hopes they’ll forgive her eventually, hopes the coaches will too.

People are trying to get her attention now, calling her name.

“Hope,” an older man from some magazine shouts, “are you retiring from the sport entirely? Or just the National Team? Will you be finishing the season with the Reign?”

She answers their questions patiently.

_No, she’s not worried at all about the fate of the National Team at the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio. They’ll win their game and secure their Olympic spot, and then the team will be in Ashlyn Harris’s capable hands._

_Is this a retirement from the NWSL league too? Yes, though she’ll be working with them to train and recruit for at least the next year._

_Yes, the woman is the same one she was photographed with in the airport earlier this month, and no, there’s nothing more she would like to say on the topic._

A few--a few make her smile.

“What do you plan on doing in retirement, do you think you’ll make the move to coaching?” the reporter from _Sports Illustrated_ asks.

Some lucky photographer manages to capture the sweet, thoughtful look that comes over Hope’s face as she prepares her answer.

“Honestly, the only retirement plans I have are to sleep late in the mornings, to drink my coffee slow out on the porch at my brother’s ranch, and spend my afternoons reading and fishing,” she tells them.

And it doesn’t matter that as she pictures it--the future, her retirement--every image has Kelley at her side.

 _Actually_ , she thinks to herself with a smile as the cameras go off again, _maybe that’s the only thing that matters at all._


	16. Epilogue

“Wake up, coach,” a voice teases right over her ear, breath tickling against her neck.

“Oh, God,” Hope groans and rolls over, pinning the smaller woman’s body beneath her, “did you not hear my retirement speech, O’Hara? I was going to sleep in …”

But Kelley just smirks and tilts her head up to kiss Hope’s lips, tongue brushing against the lower one, seeking permission to enter.

“That was over a year ago. You’ve slept in plenty since you retired, Solo. Every morning I get up and you laze about in bed for another hour, at least.”

Hope smiles--that wicked, delighted smile--and Kelley shifts under the older woman’s hold. She knows now, after more than a year, what that smile means.

“That is categorically untrue,” Hope says, and pretends to be offended. “There are some mornings when I’m up before you, you know. Mornings when I wake you up instead of the alarm. Have you forgotten about those days?”

Already, Hope is slipping her hand under Kelley’s shirt--an old, beloved jersey with Hope’s name on the back, her signature on the front--as the brunette grins and licks her tongue into the warm, wet home of Hope’s mouth before pulling back with a smug look.

“Hmmmmm,” she says, drawing out the sound and narrowing her eyes, as if deep in thought, “I guess I have. Maybe you could remind me?”

And in a single breath, a single heartbeat, Hope pushes herself up to sit over Kelley’s hips, pulling her own pajama shirt up and over her head in one single, smooth move.

“How long do we have?” she whispers as she comes back down over the other woman, her bare breasts brushing against the front of Kelley’s jersey.

“We’ll have to share the shower to be there on time,” Kelley says against Hope’s lips, slipping a hand into the waistband of the other woman’s boxer briefs.

“Well,” Hope answers, gasp turning into a low moan as Kelley slips a strong finger inside her, and then another, “what is life but sacrifice?”

Kelley just pulls the other woman closer with her free arm, until the whole of Hope’s weight is atop her, pressing her firmly into the soft mattress.

“Fuck, Kel,” Hope groans, “wasn’t I supposed to be reminding you?” 

And it’s always such a revelation, how Kelley can move her, how she can read Hope’s body and breath like a book, play her like the most precious of instruments, a Stradivarius of bone and blood.

She’s helpless but to follow where the younger woman leads her, helpless to do anything but move her hips in time with Kelley’s thrusting hand, and let her lips taste every bit of skin she can reach on the woman beneath her. The woman who holds her heart and soul.

“Sacrifice, remember?” Kelley teases, and nips at the lobe of Hope’s ear. “But don’t worry, you can remind me in the shower.”

\-----

They’re late.

By the time they pull into the gravel parking lot next to the fields, almost all the parents are there already, their children running around willy-nilly on the pitch, chasing each other back and forth between the lines.

“Alright kiddos, let’s get all lined up, tallest to shortest,” Kelley shouts, taking charge.

Hope just watches for a minute, wondering what she’s gotten herself into, wondering why she ever said yes to Kelley’s suggestion all those weeks ago when the opportunity arose.

But then, as Kelley turns her head to look back over her shoulder at where Hope still stands, she remembers.

“Showing up late for the first practice? Nice,” she hears Marcus say with a laugh from where he’s crept up behind her. “And with a hickey too; nice example, coach.”

Hope reaches up to touch her neck, fighting a losing battle against the blush blooming on her face.

“It’s amazing what the women you love can get you to do, isn’t it, coach?”

She nods, still watching Kelley, who’s abandoned any thought of organization (and her clipboard) and is now being chased around the field by twenty five- and six-year-olds.

“I still think it’s your fault, Marc. You just had to mention that Ro’s soccer coach got transferred out of state when Kelley and I were over for dinner. There’s no way she wasn’t going to volunteer to help out. And it only took a few seconds before she volunteered me as well.”

And even though her tone is dry, she’s smiling.

“Yeah,” her brother admits, laughing, “but like I was going to pass up the opportunity to throw you to the wolves. Amanda was starting to talk about me doing it.”

“Asshole,” she says affectionately, and elbows him in the ribs.

“Yeah,” he answers, “but I’m proud of it.. Besides, now you can say you’ve officially started your career as a coach the next time some journalist calls for an interview. Coach Hope--it certainly has a ring to it,” he teases.

Out on the field, Kelley’s been tackled to the ground by the small army of children, who have begun to crawl over her as she laughs.

“It’s Assistant Coach Hope, thank you very much. I made Kelley promise she’d take the lead. So it’s not _Hope Solo’s Peewee Team_ , you know?”

That last thing she wants is the focus to be on her and not the kids, not the sport. And Kelley had understood.

Hope knows Marcus does too when she feels him squeeze her shoulder in support.

“Oh God,” she says, watching Kelley try to escape from the clutches of the tiny herd of kindergartners, “look at that idiot. How did I end up with a woman who’s more of a child than my five-year-old niece, Marcus?”

But the smile on her face is fond, and the tone of her voice is loving.

“She smoothed over all your rough edges, and glued all your broken pieces back together,” he tells her. “That’s what love is, Hope, finding the someone who makes you whole.”

He doesn’t tell her what a beautiful thing it has been, to watch her fall in love. To watch her figure out who and what she wanted to be, her life to be. To watch as she crawled and crept, as she walked and ran down the long path to this point.

Happy, in love, at peace.

But, oh, it has been an honor. A beautiful gift.

“She’s the end,” Hope says into the cold morning light of this September morning.

But he knows this already. Has, honestly, since the beginning.

Maybe he didn’t plan it, for Hope to fall in love with Kelley, and Kelley with her, but he’d had a suspicion, all those months ago, that there was something about the younger woman that would appeal to his baby sister, that perky tenacity, that impish grin. He hoped that his sister would find a friend in Kelley, someone easy-going and light.

He certainly hadn’t expected to gain an unofficial sister-in-law.

But here they stand. Together. Hope with a happy, content smile on her face, laughing as she watches Kelley try to escape the clutches of a herd of kindergartners, his daughter included.

If this is the end, if this is Hope’s end, it’s a damn good one.

And if the look in his sister’s eyes is any indication, love and want and this sort of curiosity, like she can’t wait to see what the world holds for them, Hope knows it too. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Always the Only One," Lee Brice


End file.
